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Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

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Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#91

Post by rdtsc »

austenallred wrote: post #64
apalmer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely get you from a human level. From a business level google's job is to sell ads, it sell ads by providing valuable search results 'for free', and one part of the intrinsic quality of the search results is that they are 'good' in the sense that you describe. Aside from that google really doesnt owe anyone anything, if tomorrow google found that showing small businesses search results negatively affected the…

I'm speaking from a user level. If I'm a user and Google isn't showing me the best results, it's not doing its job for its users. If Google doesn't have users, its ad space isn't worth anything, and its business model ceases to exist. Google is the epitome of a consumer web business model. They sell users. So yes, they have to have buyers, but their most important job is to have users to sell.

You are not Google's customer though. You are product sold to their customers. Your buying power, add viewing abilities, knowledge of your age, hobbies and other stats is what makes Google money by proving their add buying customers with quality "product".

> If Google doesn't have users, its ad space isn't worth anything, and its business model ceases to exist.

Yes but that is a second order effect. Basically the majority of "products" have to be convinced that Google is not good enough _and_ there is another alternative (I like DuckDuckGo for example), then as you say, people will stop using Google Search. Then if Gmail goes South, people stop using that. Then Android goes South, they start using iPhones. Eventually Google will provide a lower quality "product" to their customers and Google's stock will take a hit. However, don't be fooled into thinking you are Google's primary customer because you use them for search.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#92

Post by ceejayoz »

davedx wrote: post #67
ScottWhigham wrote: post #37

Somewhat of a sidebar, but what's to prevent the following: 1) You buy 1000 links for $5 [1] 2) You enjoy a brief rise in the rankings 3) Google catches on and penalizes you 4) You use the link disavow tool to effectively say, "We didn't do it! A competitor did it to us!" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5813496

Why would you enjoy a brief rise in the rankings from something that causes 'negative SEO'? Surely these inbound links either harm or help you, not both?

Inbound links don't immediately get detected as negative. That takes a while.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#93

Post by jiggy2011 »

apalmer wrote: post #60
austenallred wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their job is to show the best results for a given search query. If my website is the best but it doesn't appear at the top because a competitor has attacked it, Google isn't doing its job.

I completely get you from a human level. From a business level google's job is to sell ads, it sell ads by providing valuable search results 'for free', and one part of the intrinsic quality of the search results is that they are 'good' in the sense that you describe. Aside from that google really doesnt owe anyone anything, if tomorrow google found that showing small businesses search results negatively affected the…

Isn't it a bit scary that the entire internet (and by association a huge chunk of the overall economy) is effectively beholden to a company that "doesn't owe anybody anything"?

I mean we wouldn't tolerate an energy supplier disconnected arbitrary supplies because they didn't feel like selling there any more.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#94

Post by at-fates-hands »

I think the more scary thing here is it's incredibly easy and dirt cheap to completely bury your competitors with bad SEO.

Think of a multi-million dollar company wanting to dispose of smaller competitors. For even a modest outlay of say $1000, you could do incredible, long-term damage to other companies web sites.

Also, I'm pretty sure Google has no plans to update their algorithm to account for this huge flaw either, making every company vulnerable to attack from anybody.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#95

Post by brown9-2 »

austenallred wrote: post #45
shawnz wrote: post #15

It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something. In Google's eyes, having false negatives is worth not having false positives, and that's just the reality of the web. Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the t…

Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job. My parents run a small e-commerce business that has supported them for years; a team of a dozen people run everything from the little website to the shipping. All of their sales come from (mostly accidental) SEO and Amazon. The scary reality is that right now that entire operation could be destroyed by a competitor in a couple minutes if they knew how. It's not hard to fin…

* The scary reality is that right now that entire operation could be destroyed by a competitor in a couple minutes if they knew how... but the idea that the livelihoods of a dozen people could vanish if someone got a little bit ambitious deserves a better response*

Isn't this always the state of running a business, though? A new competitor can always come along out of the blue and undermine your complete offering or drastically undercut you on prices.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#96

Post by programminggeek »

Here is probably the best thing I can sy about dealing with SEO... you should care a little, but you should really stop caring a lot.

What I mean is, you should totally care about SEO, and doing basic, simple things like targeting long tail traffic, some simple content syndication/distribution/guest posting, but mostly I've seen that the best results are the outcome of an ongoing process, not the fad of the day.

Creating content, being smart about it, but ignoring the day to day ebbs and flows of the SEO world will make you a much happier person because in most cases, your competition isn't doing anything at all, so putting any effort in at all is almost a win by default.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#98

Post by eieio »

rubinelli wrote: post #81
apalmer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely get you from a human level. From a business level google's job is to sell ads, it sell ads by providing valuable search results 'for free', and one part of the intrinsic quality of the search results is that they are 'good' in the sense that you describe. Aside from that google really doesnt owe anyone anything, if tomorrow google found that showing small businesses search results negatively affected the…

Isn't it ironic? Developers moved to the web to avoid becoming sharecroppers in Microsoft's fields, and now we are even more dependent on Google's goodwill. And what options are left? App stores.

Separate from the fact that a comparison between sharecropping and developing for Microsoft is absolutely absurd, pretending like the only jobs available in the developer community are dependent on either Google or app stores is ridiculous.

It's not ironic, and it's not true. Being a developer gives more freedom and more pay than the vast majority of jobs. The fact that there are some developer jobs that are gasp dependent on large companies in the field does nothing to change this.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#99

Post by JangoSteve »

adventured wrote: post #97

The solution here is dead simple. Shitty links should have no SEO value, rather than a negative value. That eliminates the problem of people using bad links to hurt their competition.

But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain. Which would probably make the practice much more widespread.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#100

Post by nhebb »

arbuge wrote: post #5
leephillips wrote: post #2

Somehow it seems unfair for Google to suggest that people spend time with the disavowal tool to correct deficiencies in Google's algorithms.

Especially when a competitor could buy 1000s of these links for $20 on a place like fiverr. Are we supposed to spend the rest of our lives disavowing this stuff? Edit: the 1000s figure is not an exaggeration. Go to fiverr and search on "back link" to see.

Google gives instruction on how to do it in bulk [0]. You can:

- Download your links from webmaster tools.

- Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links.

- Use the disavow tool [1] to upload the file. (If your livelihood depends a lot on organic traffic, that is one scary red button. The wording on the page coupled with the button text makes it sound like you will disavow all the links to your website.)

[0] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38...

[1] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?p...

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