Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2272092/Google-Confirms-Negative-SEO-Exists

by adzeds • 13 years ago

215 162 13 years ago

leephillips2• 13 years ago

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

arbuge7• 13 years ago

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.

ramayac• 13 years ago

Really?, wow... I had no idea about that. I bought some followers for a client once, but "1000's of links" for $20 sounds surreal (at least for me!)

nhebb3• 13 years ago

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&...

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

jacquesm7• 13 years ago

Even more so if those links have previously been placed by people in their pay!

So:

company pays crap SEO to place spam links all over the globe to increase google rank

google increases page rank

crap SEO works a bit more together with 1000's of fellow crap SEOs

google increases page rank

google notices problem, starts penalizing sites with crap ranks

companies that previously employed crap SEO to spam now pay crap SEO to blackmail site owners previously used to place spam links on to remove links 'or else'.

Really, this is not a good development. The burden of dealing with spam is bad enough, now we need to deal with being blackmailed by SEO spammers to clean up after them as well or risk being penalized in google? wtf?

ckluis• 13 years ago

Matt if you read hackernews. This is bullshit. Spam links should count for 0 value not negative value.

pinko• 13 years ago

How about just asking, "Hey Matt, can you say something about why you decided spam links should count for negative value instead of 0?"

I've never met him, but as demonstrated by his long HN profile, Matt is clearly a nice guy. He's also smart, so he probably thought this exact case through. None of us outside Google really know how this works.

None of that means his group didn't make a poor decision in this case, but let's see if we can talk like adults and can learn more before going all "OMFG this is bllsht" on him...

larrys2• 13 years ago

"Matt is clearly a nice guy."

In a sense he plays the role of a politician. Not able to do much (he is only one google guy after all) and trying to keep the masses feeling that he is acting in their best interest. He can't really be blamed. The bottom line is that none of this has any impact on google anyway.

If anything it simply pushes more people to want to pay for paid placement.

josefresco• 13 years ago

While I tend agree, it sounds too obvious to be a solution. I would suggest that because Google can't detect all bad links, they want to make the ones they do detect "hurt" more. If Google simply zeroed out negative links there would be no repercussions for webmasters building massive amounts of bad links. Sort of like throwing link pasta against the wall. If you build enough crappy links, you will eventually find areas of the web Google has yet to police, therefore you're always slightly ahead.

With penalties in place, those bad links might not be worth building because the penalties will outweigh the benefits of building massive amounts of low quality bad links.

tlrobinson2• 13 years ago

FYI, he does (or did, no comments in a few years): https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MattCutts

coderdude• 13 years ago

It's this https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts

sharkweek5• 13 years ago

as an FYI -- this is the real Matt Cutts --

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts

and he is quite active

Trapick• 13 years ago

That's idiotic. If spam links counted for 0 (when caught) there would be no disincentive for everyone to use them. The appropriate way is for them to count negative but have some way of legitimate sites disavowing them at some kind of time or effort cost (oh wait, that's what the system currently is).

If you have a better system let's hear it.

nhebb3• 13 years ago

There's a huge number of replicated Chinese spam sites (xyz123.com, xyz456.com, mob123.com) that link to my site. I don't know why or when they started linking to my site, but I know that i didn't have anything to do with it. Your position seems to be that it's legitimate that I'm penalized for this. It's hard not to take this issue personally. It's like being falsely accused of a crime and having to pay a fine.

kruipen• 13 years ago

Is the disavow tool not available to those who tried to use spam links and got caught? I suspect the opposite actually. Those who automate link creation, also automate link disavowing. So the spam links probably have more penalizing effect on the innocent.

Still probably the right trade-off from GOOG's perspective, as long as black hat SEO has bigger negative effect on relevance than negative SEO.

mikescoffield2• 13 years ago

This seems like an open invite for people to create blatant spam content.

arbuge7• 13 years ago

The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me. If spam links count for negative value you get competitors doing negative seo by buying cheap bad links to competing websites in bulk via places like fiverr. If they count for zero value then you get webmasters trying their luck by buying the same stuff themselves - who knows, there could be a good link amongst all the bad stuff and no harm in trying...

Something other than ranking by inbound links seems to be needed at this point.

larrys2• 13 years ago

"The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me."

Imagine thinking that the "honor system" would actually not be gamed!

Pagerank was designed a long time ago and suffers from a way of thinking that academics such as Page and Brin have.

The same thing happened with email once the cat got out of the bag on that. Or on craigslist.org - Bottom line is not anticipating what would happen when widespread use of a product occurs and the user base changes significantly.

pfortuny3• 13 years ago

It looks like it was devised without security in mind. This is something we are starting to learn not to do.

In that sense, TCP, the routing protocols, DNS &c were all designed that way (without malicious users in mind).

Which for some time was very good and then BANG!

I guess software engineering has to start dealing with this issue in a scientific way as well. And so academics will start thinking 'correctly', if this is possible.

codeulike• 13 years ago

Designing things that are secure and un-gameable while still usable is actually very difficult.

tomjen33• 13 years ago

Well the cure is pretty simple. You can apply pagerank in to calculate the reputation of each site and then multiply that number with the value of the outgoing link, using normal page rank.

How do you get the reputation information? Well you need a network of creators, people, so that you can capture the social interactions between them.

andybak• 13 years ago

Pagerank has been far from the sole ranking criteria for a long time

> Something other than ranking by inbound links seems to be needed at this point.

There's mounting evidence that this is the direction Google is going in.

makomk• 13 years ago

This would have been disasterous earlier in Google's life, but at this point they're so dominant that they can basically force everyone else to deal with their screw-ups.

adorable3• 13 years ago

How can Google detect if a spammy link has been created by the site's owner or by a competitor?

I don't see any way to detect that - apart from asking webmasters to report spammy backlinks. But that really isn't sustainable.

skyraider3• 13 years ago

Does anyone know if it's always the case that you can find spammy links to your site by using Google (e.g. link:mysite.com)? My link count in webmaster tools is an order of magnitude higher than the inbound links that I can find by using the search engine.

SquareWheel• 13 years ago

link: shows a limited subset, to prevent stealing competitor's links. Webmasters/Analytics should show everything though.

adorable3• 13 years ago

As far as I've seen, the links you'll find through the search engine are a limited set of links from "important" pages (i.e. not the spammy ones). To find your spammy backlinks you'd have to use webmaster tools.

skyraider3• 13 years ago

Right now, it seems GWT only shows a "sample" of links, and that sample is chosen from the 100 domains that link most frequency. GWT's "total links" count for my site is about 75x larger than the number of links they'll give me. I'm wondering if it's a spammer registering a whole bunch of spammy domains.

GWT doesn't seem to allow me to discover what all of these links are, so I couldn't disavow them even if I wanted to.

trevin2• 13 years ago

Google's WT index seems to provide a fair amount of the links. There are a few 3rd party tools that do a really good job of indexing nearly all of the backlinks to your site:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org http://www.ahrefs.com http://www.majesticseo.com

skyraider3• 13 years ago

Thanks, opensiteexplorer displays about 75x more links that GWT does. Great stuff.

pfortuny3• 13 years ago

"It is impossible".

"It is quite difficult".

"We work hard to prevent it".

It is exactly the same as behaviour security companies had in the past until they learned that, to quote Adidas, 'impossible is nothing' and that 'quite difficult' is nonsense due to automation.

It used to be quite difficult to stage a DOS (anyone remembers the first one Yahoo! suffered in 2000?, ah, those were the days when we were surprised by them...). Nowadays a bunch of kiddies can put amazon down on its knees.

Well, probably not amazon.

benbeltran2• 13 years ago

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" - (attributed to John Maynard Kaynes)

The algorithm has changed. The web has changed. Naturally, google has changed.

pfortuny3• 13 years ago

It is not a problem of a change in reality. It is a problem of wrong statements:

'It is impossible' is certainly false on the internet for almost anything you can think.

'It is very difficult': See the sysjail fiasco [1]. Once something is deemed possible, it is not very difficult, on computer systems.

So, it is not the facts that have changed, it is their perception by Google.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysjail

shawnz2• 13 years ago

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 title of their blog.

adorable3• 13 years ago

> Besides, it seems to me like these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog.

or by all the people who have a site with traffic coming from Google

damoncali2• 13 years ago

The government may some day think otherwise. Google's monopoly on search is substantial enough that they risk much by eschewing fairness in favor of quality. I would tread very lightly if I were in Google's shoes.

magicalist4• 13 years ago

Good luck defining "fairness". That regulation is going to go really well.

ebiester• 13 years ago

The question is, of course, what are the best results when it comes to "buy viagra?"

nivla• 13 years ago

>It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings.

It is as much as it is the job of Microsoft to allow you to install 3rd party browser or OS on a desktop.

When you have a monopoly in an industry, you don't get to choose favorites else it will considered an abuse of power.

lukeschlather• 13 years ago

Google's product is choosing favorites. You tell Google not to choose favorites, they just return a random list of webpages.

sharkweek5• 13 years ago

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 title of their blog.

Or anyone who runs an online business...?

Let's say you're a small ecommerce site, your site is growing, your blog is gaining readership as it's become a great resource. One of your nasty competitors who doesn't like that your rankings are going up for all this hard work decides to hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam.

That's a very realistic concern for a lot of webmasters and small business owners (the big guys suffer a lot less from negative SEO because their link portfolio is far more balanced out). I'd much rather have Google just give a ZERO value to low quality and shady links as opposed to a negative value.

mattezell7• 13 years ago

"...hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam..."

I saw this very thing happen in real life, actually... though it wasn't a competitor...

A well meaning team member on a project which I was previously affiliated with decided "Hey, I know how we can get this project some exposure! FIVERR!"...

Yes, I know that there are better, less shady, approaches to generating traction, but we will just blame inexperience and a temporary lapse in judgement for the expensive lesson in negative SEO...

Long story short, weeks of organic link building and organic service/site promotion were completely obliterated within 72hrs of $20 worth of Fiverr backlink purchases...

Needless to say, so far as I know, the team only uses 100% whitehat approaches for site and product promotions now...

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

I don't understand why the quality of the blog should have anything to do with the search results that link to the ecommerce site. Just because your site should show up in the ranking for "reset color scheme Samsung monitor" doesn't mean it should show up in the ranking for "buy samsung monitor".

To the extent google is conflating the positive signals for the first with the second, that's a bug in their algorithm that should be fixed over time. When it is I certainly won't cry any tears for the people that exploited the bug all this time.

austenallred3• 13 years ago

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 find a package on Fiverr that includes 1,000 spammy links for $5, so a competitor could easily direct 5,000 spammy links (more than the entire amount of links directed at them right now) for $50.

Is that use case emotionally loaded? Sure. But it isn't extreme. I recognize that the company only exists because Google gave it a chance to, but the idea that the livelihoods of a dozen people could vanish if someone got a little bit ambitious deserves a better response than what Google has given it.

Google's current options for removing negative SEO are very hand-wavy, mostly because they don't really believe negative SEO is a large issue. Admittedly, potential for negative SEO is a cop-out black-hatters use to cover their tracks more than it is a real threat, but that doesn't mean Google can ignore it.

Google's current solutions for combating negative SEO: "Ask webmasters to remove the links" - a complete joke and everyone knows it, and the Link Disavow Tool, which is pretty difficult to use, and Google admits that it may be several months before the rankings are updated after links are disavowed.

shawnz2• 13 years ago

> Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job.

Why? You're not paying them to list your website. Meanwhile I am paying them, in ad impressions, to look at your listing. If you want reliable returns, buy an ad instead.

EDIT: What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter to me if I see "Jack's Pastries" or "Jill's Pastries" in my search results. Your livelihood is not Google's responsibility, unless you buy ad space from them.

ryandrake• 13 years ago

Assuming you are not purchasing ads, I'd argue that relying heavily on a company you have no formal commercial relationship with to bring you customers might not be a great idea.

brown9-2• 13 years ago

* 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.

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

Google's job is not to be fair. Google's job is to have good results. If they really wanted to, they could have 99% perfect results, and deliberately screw over companies the other 1% of the time, and they would still be doing their job.

Do I want a fair search engine? Yes I do. Does a search engine have to be fair to have good results? Not at all.

tomjen33• 13 years ago

You are partly right, but you seem to think it is googles job to serve you, it is not. It is googles job to make money when you click on ads, so their job is to make you click on ads.

And while you are right that some false positives may be acceptable there is a hell of a difference between accidental false positives and false positives created because of competitors actions.

You don't want to live in a world where the scummiest bastard gets to put his links ahead of they guy who is actually providing a service. We already have that situation if you google for the names of certain appliances (eg. my dishwasher) where all the results are to meta-shopping sites.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

It is Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a fair shot - any unfairness ensures the top results will go to organisations who are best at gaming the system: unfairness harms the results.

Google won search by being good at this when other search engines were not.

mikescoffield2• 13 years ago

Is it easier to increase your rankings by a) building solid quality backlinks to your site or b) building tons of spam links to your competitors' sites?

If the answer is b), which I suspect it might due to reading some comments here citing fiverr examples, then allowing negative SEO is decreasing the quality of search results.

Also, my guess is where the damage is really done is w/ long tail searches. That's when I almost always encounter random, irrelevant, spammy sites - when I search for something very specific in Google.

brudgers• 13 years ago

It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something.

"Best" means best for Google, not most informative to you. The big deal about negative SEO is that "worse" means worse for Google - again, it has nothing to do with your or my needs.

The combination of positive and negative SEO is intended solely for Google's long term benefit. Maybe goodwill enters into it, but only to the extent it creates value for Google's shareholders.

arbuge7• 13 years ago

"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."

I would think it's pretty obvious they have to ensure every webmaster has a fair shot to guarantee the best results.

If a crappy website rises to the top by doing negative seo and denying the best results their fair shots, Google is not doing its job.

cousin_it• 13 years ago

Do you think the world would be worse off if Google were fair to webmasters? Do you think perfect competition should trump all other values?

dbla• 13 years ago

Why does google need to penalize sites for spammy inbound links? Couldn't they instead just make those links not contribute at all (not penalize the ranking but not boost it at all either)? I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but I'm curious.

rubinelli3• 13 years ago

Simply ignoring spammy links doesn't reduce link spam, because people still have an incentive to keep spamming in the off chance that some of those links will be considered valid.

eddywebs• 13 years ago

The article is inaccurate read between the lines of the comments.

ScottWhigham• 13 years ago

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

sharkweek5• 13 years ago

We're seeing a lot of this tactic in a lot of the more... difficult industries right now with super high value terms (payday loans, viagra, etc). What is hot and popular is doing exactly 1-3 except on a hyper-rotation of domains.

Build up a bunch of shitty websites, get them ranking for a few weeks, they inevitably get penalized, then just switch domains and rinse and repeat.

davedx• 13 years ago

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?

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

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

slig• 13 years ago

In the Google Webmaster's tools it's possible to download a list of all the new links that are linking to your site.

Using this tool I've been able to discover that someone has started to buy spammy links in wordpress comments linking to my website. Those wordpress blogs are full of spam, so I want to believe that Google is already ignoring everything there.

trevin2• 13 years ago

The most frustrating part of negative SEO or any link cleanup is that Google doesn't tell which links they think are spammy links. If you are working for/with a site that has been online for a while, they will have thousands of crappy looking links pointing to their site.

Scraper sites pick up content from other websites all the time and cross post with porn and other crap. Directory submissions that were perfectly fine 5 or 10 years ago can now be viewed as "low quality" by Google. Blogs that used to be well-maintained have been bought by spammers and SEOs and are now content farms.

Google's lack of transparency when it comes to links is very troublesome. I understand they can't give out the ins and outs of their algo, but asking your average website owner to go through 10k+ backlinks and identify and remove the links is a pretty tall task when there isn't a clear standard on what is bad and what isn't.

carl689• 13 years ago

The article has some user comments I found relevant I don't see pointed out here.

"That change was actually made a year ago. The only change on that page is the positioning of the video. The actual text has not changed in over a year."-Barry Schwartz

AND

"The article is also incredibly wrong about the previous change. Google did't add the "almost" last year (2012) but TEN years ago, in 2003, as you can see with Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20030915000000*/http://www.google... -LowLevel

DanielBMarkham• 13 years ago

The amazing thing is that this is news.

Of course competitors can trash your organic rankings -- and it's a lot easier for them to trash you than it is to promote themselves.

I'm glad Google is slowly coming around to admitting that this house of mirrors has some flaws. The more information publishers get about this, the better choices we can make in content selection.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

A confirmation of fact is less relevant than peoples assumptions?

What you seem to be suggesting is that information that people cannot be 100% sure of is perfectly valid, and reasonable to base decisions on. But, when that information is confirmed to be true, that has not enough value to report.

I simply do not understand or accept that way of thinking.

btilly4• 13 years ago

What is news here is not that negative SEO exists. It is that Google has been forced to admit that it is a real issue.

Edit: After reading the comments at the end of the story, magicalist is right. The story is wrong, Google made this change a lot longer than a week ago, it isn't actually news.

magicalist4• 13 years ago

...10 years ago.

danielweber• 13 years ago

Joe jobs are old enough to drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job

hippich2• 13 years ago

I believe true way of dealing with spam links for Google would be ignore these. It will solve several problems at once: prevent spammed websites getting into index, prevent legitimate websites getting banned because of negative seo, make "seo specialist" job become a joke, and people eventually give up paying for it.

Google on the other hand tries to punish, i.e. to scare away potential gamers, instead of ignoring these. I believe this is wrong and inefficient approach.

damon_c• 13 years ago

It would be interesting if Google let us optionally search using the original pure pagerank search from 10 years ago.

Would it be like turning off spam filtering on email?

jonknee• 13 years ago

Negative SEO and negative click fraud (a competitor clicking on my AdSense ads fraudulently) are the two biggest things that keep me up at night. It's terrifying knowing that something so simple can take me out overnight and there's nothing I can do to prevent it.

I'm surprised this hasn't become more like DDOS where thugs blackmail webmasters into submission with the threat of taking them offline. Or maybe it has and I just haven't heard...

btilly4• 13 years ago

Weird evil conspiracy idea.

The more people use negative SEO and their victims use Google's tools to disavow it, the worse Bing's results get.

ywang0414• 13 years ago

Any system can be cheated. Nothing here.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

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.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

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.

adventured2• 13 years ago

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.

JangoSteve• 13 years ago

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.

adventured2• 13 years ago

Initially it would. If Google is any good at scoring links webmasters would quickly figure out the non-benefit and would stop.

And Google could feel free to be overly harsh in making links neutral in value. Better to miss to the middle, than to miss to the negative and punish good sites being bombed with spam links by competitors.

Aka first do no harm.

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

> But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain.

Well, nothing to lose except money: to discourage this, you just have to have links-of-unknown-quality produce no benefit, and links-with-positive-quality provide positive value; this is better than links of unknown value providing positive value and links with negative quality providing negative value.

macspoofing• 13 years ago

Is it me, or has HN been invaded by SEO consultants (case in point: OP). There's quite a bit more SEO-related topics these days. It seems to have started a few months ago, and it's getting worse.

kbojody• 13 years ago

Currently the linked Article redirects to a removed page.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2272092/Page-Removed

Here is a cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

rainhacker• 13 years ago

"This page has been removed due to inaccuracies. We regret the error."

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

"This page has been removed due to inaccuracies. We regret the error."

hmm?

ekanes• 13 years ago

One way Google could mitigate this would be if webmasters could tell Google about new/expected links. Obviously some links are unexpected (great!) but if Google new you weren't trying to add 50 links, and 50 links showed up, perhaps they could take that into account.

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

Seems to me the general solution to negative SEO is instead of an unknown-quality-link bonus and a bad-link penalty, unknown-quality links should have no value and good links should have positive value.

The problem is it is probably harder to split the world into probably-good vs. unknown links rather than probably-bad vs. unknown links.

kushti• 13 years ago

Hey, Google, what's about "Don't be evil" populism ?

csomar• 13 years ago

Wait a second, why doesn't Google just count the link juice of these links are 0 (null).

This doesn't benefit the spammer, and it doesn't kill the innocent. Am I missing something here?

Matt_Cutts4• 13 years ago

Note: this article is over a year old. The article makes it sound as if this is some new pronouncement, but it's really not. I've been using the language mentioned in this article since 2010, at least: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/... where I said "we’ve said in the past that we work very hard to prevent competitor A from hurting competitor B."

The change on the official guidelines comes from a tech writer noticing that I normally say "we work hard to prevent this" and asking back in February 2012 if we should update the language on that page. I said yes and the language changed in March 2012. It looks like this article is from April 2012.

One of the big reasons we say softer things (rather than "it's impossible") regarding the idea of negative SEO is that we have seen people to pretty crazy things to steal/hijack domain names in the past, like the bizarre history of sex.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com

People talk about negative SEO far more than people actually attempt it, because you're never quite sure what effect (say) pointing some links to a site might have--it might help the site instead of hurting it--plus it's typically a better use of your time to develop your own site.

But if there's a site that is worried about negative SEO, the site can disavow any links they want using our the disavow tool in Google's Webmaster Tools. You can even sort to see the most recent links if you're worried that this is something that just started.

The primary usage of the disavow tool is so that a site can disavow bad linking that the site did itself and can't get removed from the web, but the disavow tool also works fine to disavow links that you're worried might be spammy.

Caligula• 13 years ago

It just seems like such a bizarre game we are required to play. I am picturing you jeering at us to "dance monkey dance".

lingben2• 13 years ago

Matt, no amount of hand-waving will convince people when there is ample evidence of negative SEO, including meticulous case studies published online.

As well, the very fact that Google has given in and introduced the disavow tool, it is incontrovertible proof that negative SEO is effective.

Google had a good run but you have not been able to keep up with those who have striven day and night to beat your algos. The question is, can google play catch up? and do so in time?

Several billions of dollars are riding on that question.

pgrote2• 13 years ago

Your comment really resonates with me.

Where you rank, why you rank, etc. with Google is never explained. This used to be effective in the old days, but they have lost the edge. Instead of focusing on providing excellent search results, Google has focused on trying to draw in all parts of the internet to personalize search. This is where I think Google has lost the focus on quality.

Matt_Cutts4• 13 years ago

We've looked into most of the blog posts about negative SEO, and in most cases we've found major flaws or bad assumptions. Kind of like this guy was convinced that authorship caused his traffic to go down by 90%: http://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-decreas... except that wasn't the case: http://aberrant.me/no-google-authorship-didnt-decrease-your-...

The disavow tool is not "incontrovertible proof" that negative SEO is effective. We introduced the disavow tool for people who had trouble cleaning up their own spammy/bad linkbuilding and weren't able to get every bad link removed from the web before doing reconsideration requests. Please go back to read our original announcement at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-too... to confirm that was the primary purpose.

By the way lingben, I just took one of the most passed-around examples where someone claimed that negative SEO worked and debunked that blog post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5815658

hippich2• 13 years ago

Two problems - this disavow tool is not prominent in webmaster tools, second - have no clue how long it takes. Recently I found TONS of obviously spam links pointing to my site and tried to use this tool. After two weeks - no noticeable results. I.e. no feedback.

Overall - whole no-feedback nature of your SE is what bothers me the most. Just put rules upfront, give some feedback to webmasters and ignore seo gamers.

flaktrak• 13 years ago

Matt aren't you getting sick of having to constantly defend the actions of your employer? You seem like a positive guy but it must be getting even you down.

scottgerri• 13 years ago

Nowadays, Social bookmarking and Directory submission are important and great way to get traffic and all source..

Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

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