61–70 of 96 posts
This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted... I hope this is going to be fixed somehow. EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" o…
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Your post has nothing to do with the previous message or point, you're just switching arguments. Most e-commerce businesses cannot scale /downscale every 50% + or - organic search traffic changes.
Apologies your right. Trying to bring it back around to my original point by rephraseing my orgional statement then. If your worried about this update then you haven't been doing seo right and If your relying solely on a 3rd party for the existence or profitability of your company then you have bigger issue at hand than just your seo.
>>If your worried about this update then you haven't been doing seo right
I love this statement, heard it right after Panda when the "good SEOs" were bashing the panda hit sites...and then their own sites were destroyed too. As horrible as it may sound, I actually felt good.
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There was a lot of collateral damage done to innocent sites during both Panda and Penguin. I think there's good reason for everybody who relies on Google traffic to worry a bit.
I understand it's all algorithmic and there will be some truly innocent collateral damage involved but Google wouldn't be pushing this out if they didn't feel the overall quality of search would increase. Most of the collateral damage is going to be people straddling the grey hat line and rightly so in my own opinion.
Glass fans should be happy to know that shortly after the algo change they should be seeing another wave of public demonstrations, perhaps a self-driving car sighting or two.
I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links. As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics,…
How would you solve it then? By putting more focus on social media? They are doing that, too, but that can be even more easily abused sometimes. Google can distinguish between the less spammy and the more spammy links anyway, but it's a hard problem, so they can distinguish it to a certain agree. But Google's algorithm by now is certainly more complex than "giving each link a vote". A lot of SEO is on-page SEO, too,…
By this do you mean popular people will rank more easily like they do now? How is popularity determined? By links?
re: How do you solve it?
You don't. At least, not how Google does it. Google is trying to act like the government of the internet and tries to manipulate behavior into things that align with Google's goals - primarily making money via AdWords. To achieve this goal, they try to discredit competing advertising paid link systems because they break Google's system. It's akin to twitter making it all but impossible to have a successful twitter client.
At some point, there is too much money in the current system to render what Google's webspam team does as much more than an elaborate game of whack-a-mole. They hit spam, more spam pops up elsewhere.
The only way for Google to make their algorithm better is to take out or dial back the "buyable" elements - the social ones like links, tweets, facebook fans, etc. They did this pretty effectively with AdWords over the years. It's harder with organic results, but not impossible. Arguably, for many people you could put 10 reasonable, relevant, non-spam results on the front page of a given search term and it would be "good enough" for many people. Something akin to DuckDuckGo.
Since this is a non-trivial problem what Google is doing is basically better than anyone else so far, and there is a lot of value in the social signals if only because it makes people care more about Google than they care about ranking on Twitter or Facebook. So, kudos to Google on what they're doing, but there is nothing inherent to search that requires a link to be a vote or for that to be such an important relevance factor.
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Do you have some examples?
No - but I heard people talking about that. Is this even possible?
This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted... I hope this is going to be fixed somehow. EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" o…
This has killed rankings for a few sites that I've worked with. It is really easy to get thousands of spam/porn sites to link to a competitor with exact match anchor text for whatever keyword you want. And it's basically impossible to figure out which competitor is doing it to you.
Google used to just 'devalue' all crap links pointing to a site. A link could never hurt you. Now that links can hurt your site, it's totally wide open for this type of thing to happen.
Here's a good case study/experiment done on negative SEO if anybody is interested in further reading: http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-...
I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links. As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics,…
They treat public links as a voting mechanism. Unfortunately, in the era of social networking, and maybe outside of their own Google+ network, they probably don't even see the majority of high quality links based on honest personal recommendations any more.
Ultimately, I think this is going to be a good thing. Relying on a single, unaccountable source for most of your traffic was always a risky prospect for a small business, however good your products/services might be. I'm much happier with the situation we're seeing now, where search traffic represents maybe 30-40% of our total visits over a month, social networks are collectively a larger part, and there's also a substantial minority of direct traffic that presumably came from off-line word of mouth referrals and/or more traditional marketing channels where we use them.
This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted... I hope this is going to be fixed somehow. EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" o…
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It's hard to know if it's a real problem because when people are caught, it's hard to know if they're lying about how a competitor did it to screw them over. Anyway, here's what someone should do: Buy a bunch of spam links on fivver for keyword "matt cutts" and point it to his domain www.mattcutts.com. (He's one of the few people on Earth with plausible deniability regarding Google manipulation.) If you successfully…
His name probably has immunity, just as most large brands do. Small/er sites are fried. Deep fried.
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Eh, I disagree with your definition of "white hat SEO". White hat is about earning links. A arms length third party has to give you a link for it to count. That means it has a lot more to do with Public Relations than Page Rank. If you drop a link yourself in a forum or blog comment, that's fundamentally NOT white hat. That's just non-automated black hat. That's also been below Google's radar. This is the fundamental…
Fair enough, but if forum links aren't white hat then 99% of SEO companies/freelancers are black hat. I have yet to hear an SEO company say "We'll make your product great enough people will link to it organically."
That's what the best ones like CitationLabs and Eric Ward do.
A really good SEO can produce 100-150 truly earned links a month. But that would cost you $15k/mo and most clients aren't willing to make that kind of long term investment.
Why won't they invest is a question for another thread, but I suspect blackhats have created a "market for lemons."