Negative SEO Does Exist

http://webmarketingschool.com/negative-seo-exist/

by searchmartin • 12 years ago

252 212 12 years ago

Last week Matt Cutts said at SMX advanced that negative SEO wasnt a thing. Rand Fishkin asked for evidence it does. Well....... hows this?

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

I'm so happy google did this. For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine.

Let me explain: When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com I was trying to achieve something positive. I did not realize how infested geocities had become with spammers, linkfarms and other trash.

Probably at least a few million of the accounts were either compromised or somehow tricked into placing low value links on their pages at the behest of SEO types that were engaging in 'scalable link building'. Comment spam and so on.

Very annoying. And I really did not know what to do about this, it felt wrong that I'd be contributing to these businesses somehow even in a peripheral way.

And then google decided to penalize 'spammy links'. So the tables are turned. Not a day passes without some whiny email from some SEO character that is trying to clean up after their past misdeeds. They try to automate this of course (imagine that their trickery would no longer scale) so they spam tons of automated emails to webmasters threatening to use the google disavow tool because they have been penalized.

So the tables are turned, for a change. Suddenly all those trashy links are degrading rather than enhancing the stature of these companies and their ill motivated SEO brethern.

So, I hope this stays, as far as I'm concerned google can shut down the disavow tool and those that lived by the sword should die by the sword. It's like an 'own goal' by the bad element in the SEO community.

At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). Especially since if a competitor successfully uses google as an offensive weapon that they can remain unidentified or undetected. (Which makes me wonder about the motives of the OP not to disclose who this was, it would be a lot easier to verify the story, and any subsequent retaliation could be dealt with in the same manner.)

But overall this spammy links penalty is a good development.

The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take manual action to remove the spam that was placed in an automated way by the perps in the past, that's a really bad balance there.

I'm completely not impressed by these threats for reocities.com I only care that the content is online. I guess I could replace all the outbound links by 'nofollows' but that would hurt a lot of good sites as well and I really hope that google can tell the difference between 'good' and 'bad' links in this respect. (If they can't that would be a huge problem)

edit: the voting on this comment is interesting, 1->+9->+1->+9->+5

Never had a comment oscillate like that.

oddevan• 12 years ago

At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves).

That seems to be what people are most upset about.

cosmie3• 12 years ago

  > At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves).

That was the point being made - people are being targeted by their competitors, using the negative penalty from link farms to devalue competitor's sites. And Google can't tell the difference. You're right in that it's SEOs doing what they've always done, it just now has a penalty attached which gives unscrupulous ones a new service to offer and good SEO's a link-removal service.

  > The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take manual action to remove the spam that was placed in an automated way by the perps in the past, that's a really bad balance there.

While it may be a manual action on Google's part, it's quickly becoming automated[1].

[1] http://www.removeem.com/

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

Yes, I know that is the point being made. But that's a very small bit of fall-out from a huge improvement.

OP is right in fact but this is a rarity, overall google search results improved and the fact that the whole SEO world is in panic about this (proof in my inbox) is fantastic news. That it can be used for bad purposes is obvious, those that were gaming before will game this just as much. But rather than being in denial about negative SEO google should simply come clean about the numbers, any kind of classification system has false positives, a categoric denial is simply something you should not believe.

And in spite of that Google should stay the course, they're not a court and nobody has an innate right to an x% of search traffic. If that were the case we could replace google with a link lottery.

silverbax88• 12 years ago

I think you may be missing the point of the article. It is now possible to basically DDOS someone out of their rankings, even if their rankings are legitimate.

tomp• 12 years ago

This update doesn't change anything, really, it just reverses the effect; before, you were paying SEO black-hats to create links to your site, which should result in elevating your search rank, but now, you will be paying SEO black-hats to create links to competitors' sites, sinking them in the search results, and relatively elevating your search rank.

The only thing search engines can do to stop SEO spam is to avoid giving any weight to spammy links.

cpayne624• 12 years ago

Agree 100%. No benefit, no penalty

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

avoid giving any weight to spammy links //

Which only requires perfect spam link analysis /s (or no ability to rank sites).

Isofarro14• 12 years ago

The only thing search engines can do to stop SEO spam is to avoid giving any weight to spammy links.

That didn't work before. Zero weight for spammy links is gamed by spammers by spamming everything at full blast. There was no downside for them. There are better dials and switches than falling back to a known broken model.

With penalties in place spammers need to get those existing bad links removed for their own sites / or build from scratch new sites with clean link profiles (which they are doing anyway, slash and burn). Now they will need to multiply their efforts to negatively target sites above them (not just rank one site, but unrank several sites). Good luck doing that without leaving a detectable fingerprint/trace.

The history of when links are created - that will leave a clear beacon that a site has been targeted. Unless a spammer does it very slowly over the course of years. In which case, LOL.

Don't you think it would be noticeable that a site ranking well, with a clean back link profile suddenly starts attracting heaps and heaps of bad spammy links? That's a clear indication something is going on.

The better time to use negative SEO is when the spammer has already gotten ahead of his competitor. Then the influx of bad links might look like an effort to regain rankings. That would be more interesting.

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

As mentioned in the article, that works if you can identify every spammy link. Without a penalty, you can make a million spammy links, let the filter catch 95% of them, and reap the benefits from the ones that get past.

That system isn't exploitable to sabotage another site's rank, but it also doesn't work at preventing link farms (as evidenced by most Google results before the recent change).

aetherson• 12 years ago

I guess the frustrating difference is:

Suppose that the natural situation, with no SEO at all, is that you have the #1 site on some keyword, and your competitor has a lower ranking.

With "positive" SEO, okay, your competitor might have paid a lot of money and bumped you to the #2 site, and that might be frustrating -- but you're still #2!

With "negative" SEO, your competitor pays a lot of money and now you're #100. And that sucks more for you.

Probably not important in the really big keywords where all the top sites have always paid big money for SEO -- then, sure, it's all just relative. But in the relative backwaters where lots of sites aren't engaging in SEO at all, having negative techniques work is a lot more frustrating to the people who just don't want to play the game.

rasz_pl2• 12 years ago

Google, lets stop pretending we are talking about any other search engines, will learn in time to identify and penalize source of spammy links instead of recipients. Webmasters should be responsible only for the content they have control over.

boobsbr• 12 years ago

When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com

I'm really scared of finding my old homepage there. Dorkiness level off the charts...

Do you know if Fortunecity was ever re-hosted in a similar fashion? I had a Diablo 1 clan page there somewhere.

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

I'm really scared of finding my old homepage there. Dorkiness level off the charts...

Hehe, let me know if you want it removed.

Do you know if Fortunecity was ever re-hosted in a similar fashion? I had a Diablo 1 clan page there somewhere.

Web.archive.org may have it.

freebs• 12 years ago

Please don't forget that many companies may go through multiple SEO/marketing agencies before they find a team that knows what they are doing. Just because someone is cleaning it up doesn't mean they made the mess.

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

Doing due diligence on the parties that you enter into business with is an obligation on the part of the purchaser. Anybody that does something shady which you claim was done outside of your control should be accompanied by a breach of contract lawsuit or something to that effect. And if it isn't then that implies tacit agreement or turning a blind eye to the tactics deployed as long as there are results. Reputable companies keep a tight leash on what subcontractors do in their name.

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine. //

I'm surprised at you for ascribing evil to an entire online industrial sector; I'd think you'd take a more circumspect approach.

Y'know, given that the next line is tantamount to 'I perpetrated a massive copyright infringement on hundreds of thousands of people's online content'; that you might feel that even tortuous actions can sometimes be justified.

People do bad things in most (all?) areas of human activity; SEOs can do good too IMO. It decreases the impact of any analysis to ignore that SEO is a valid activity - albeit, yes, sometimes done in malicious, invalid and/or immoral ways.

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

I call them as I see them. If you want to characterize reocities.com as a copyright infringement case then I invite you to sue.

I take it you have a similar attitude towards archive.org?

SEO's act the same way arms dealers act during an armed conflict. They will happily sell their weapons to all sides while they profit without creating any value for anybody. I don't care one bit about how much traffic google sends me on either ww.com, reocities.com or any of the other web properties that I maintain, I've yet to 'SEO optimize' anything and I feel that SEO's are as an industry just one notch above mass spammers. In some cases worse than spammers (because they actively destroy good websites).

I tend to be rather black-and-white about this because as a webmaster I have to fight these jerks on a regular basis and it tends to show in how I write about them. Consider me pissed off. I feel like I'm in the middle of a shoot-out between Google on the one side, and a bunch of over-active greedy script kiddies and their customers on the other.

If you feel SEO can do good show me an example where an SEO achieved value creation rather than shifting around a percentage in some zero sum game. The only value SEO's create is for themselves.

tlogan• 12 years ago

  edit: the voting on this comment is interesting, 1->+9->+1->+9->+5

People working for Google +1

Others -1

Does that make sense?

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

People working for Google +1

That would be a first.

I don't usually find myself 'on the side of google' in any argument and I highly doubt that so many googlers would be unable to think for themselves but would blindly upvote anything supportive of their employer.

By the same token, I don't think 'everybody else' includes all the people working in SEO.

antjanus3• 12 years ago

I'd like to look at it in another way. I've a small blog, one that I love running, it makes barely any money, but for a long time ranked for some pretty good keywords.

Anyways, a few of my articles blew up on hackernews, reddit, even on twitter (with smashing magazine tweeting it out), as a result, everyone and their grandma linked back to my articles when they discussed the topic it targeted.

What happened then? I looked at my link profile and I've a few thousand "dangerous looking" backlinks. All from people that had low-ranking blogs or 0 ranking blogs, or that used Tumblr's share feature (which blogged a link and an excerpt) to "bookmark" my site. And some from people that FULLY reblogged my site without permission. Meaning that they took the entire article. They weren't shady either, they had a big banner that said: "I repost articles for my own use to read in case the site goes down" or something to that effect with, obviously, a link back to my site as a source.

What happened? Penguin, Panda, and all the other animals killed most of these sites. Even considered some of them spam.

Now, I have a "dirty" link profile through no fault of my own, using no "shady" tactics.

This just pisses me off to no ends. I never "link built" anything, the links just happened naturally. Yet, I get penalized for it. It's fucking shitty. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is?

If someone copies your content, go after them, sue them if you have to and out them. Make sure that they realize that if they copy your content that it will hurt.

I have absolutely no idea what if any backlinks I have to my blog, nor could I care less about it. People will read it, or maybe they won't, like yours it id non-commercial, a way for me to practice my writing and to sometimes tell stories and share those with others. It does not make me money and it costs me time. What google makes of it is not my problem.

I would not think of paying someone to increase the visibility and it took many years to get to any kind of exposure at all.

Isofarro14• 12 years ago

"I never "link built" anything, the links just happened naturally"

Great. that's what's supposed to happen, links accumulate naturally. (I'm deliberately ignoring the inconsistencies in your story, BTW ;-)

"Yet, I get penalized for it. It's fucking shitty"

How are you being penalised? Did you get a warning of bad links in your Google Webmaster dashboard? If not, how do you know?

Links accumulate, and some disappear over time. That's natural on the web. If Google taking out a bunch of low quality sites affects your own site, that only means the value of your site is significantly positively affected by these sites, so your site was over-ranked. Now it's placed closer to where it should be.

Being linked to by big traffic sources also brings attention from less known sources - that's quite normal.

leephillips• 12 years ago

Imagine how much worse you'd feel if you found out that someone who doesn't like you did this to you deliberately.

Google makes this too easy. Through ill-considered changes to their algorithms they've provided a new weapon for the unscrupulous.

I've noticed a similar thing with my own personal site. For years it was on Google's front page for a bunch of things (niche topics that wouldn't translate into money). So was my name, which really surprised me. Lately, as it's gotten more links to it from higher profile sources, including some national magazine sites, it's rapidly fallen back in Google's listings.

lifeisstillgood3• 12 years ago

I don't fully understand this. How did you look at your link profile? Is this a blessed google thing ? And how do you know your drop in rankings is down to this back link issue - what if other people have written better stuff (apologies !)

thefreeman• 12 years ago

You are totally missing the entire point of this article. People are abusing these techniques to de-rank their competitors.

Perhaps in your specific example, these links are old enough that you can be sure that they were originally done for "seo" purposes. But in many situations that is not the case.

Also, you are completely ignoring the possible situation in which a website was bought by an "ethical" company and now they are trying to clean up the misdeeds of the past.

DontBeADick4• 12 years ago

I think your eagerness to pat yourself on the back has caused you to miss the main point of the article.

Congrats on your geocities thing, I guess?

spudlyo• 12 years ago

Your nickname reminder isn't working. Try a post-it note on your monitor.

dang• 12 years ago

Please stop being personally rude in HN comments.

This comment would be better if, in addition to not being personally rude, it told us what the main point of the article really is.

rpedroso• 12 years ago

  So, I hope this stays, as far as I'm concerned google can shut down the disavow tool and those that lived by the sword should die by the sword. It's like an 'own goal' by the bad element in the SEO community.

A company I once worked at received Google search penalties about six months before hiring me. I quickly discovered a lot of the spammy links -- their old SEO vendor exploited the shady tactics that Panda/Penguin were designed to combat.

This wasn't the case of a content farm abusing SEO to ramp up their ad impressions: an innocent company was harmed by a black-hat SEO. The vendor handed in a report with rankings updates and number of links added every month, but nobody at the company was tracking the individual links and keeping track of the vendor's behavior.

I agree that spammy websites should be punished in their search rankings, but the link disavowal tool was integral to removing an innocent company's search penalties.

Isofarro14• 12 years ago

Are they taking their old SEO vendor to court, or are they just going to let them get away with it knowing full well other businesses are none the wiser?

walshemj2• 12 years ago

Your scraping geocities for MFA and your trashing SEOs :-) a good example Cognitive dissonance -you certainty have a lot of Chutzpah.

golf clap

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

I think you're projecting here. Reocities cost a ton of money to create, costs money to run and has $0 income. What you would do with it is a totally different matter, I just run it as a public service and if I shut it down tomorrow I'll have more money next month than I do today.

huhtenberg3• 12 years ago

How can it not exist?

You basically take competitors site and run a standard SEO link farm thing on it. Google picks it up and punishes the site, done. What am I missing? How can Google tell the real motive behind detected SEO activity?

searchmartin4• 12 years ago

watch the video in the post, its only 30 seconds long. The question was "does negative SEO exist", listen to the response. :)

huhtenberg3• 12 years ago

               Sorry
 
  Because of its privacy settings, 
  this video cannot be played here.

(edit) - It works now.

tluyben2• 12 years ago

Well the myth is that this will not punish the target site. It's not true which has been clear for a long time, but Matt insists it is.

johnward6• 12 years ago

Matt doesn't want to admit it but we all know it's true. The algorithm punishes shitty links and they can't tell if those shitty links were generated by me to increase my ranking or by a competitor trying to harm my ranking.

Angostura• 12 years ago

I think its the difference between assigning a spammy link 0 and a spammy link -1 when calculating rank. With the former, I can use a thousand spammy links, knowing that even if only 1% get through, I still benefit.

viraptor3• 12 years ago

I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most visible way to make a point that can't be denied.

PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone would already give it a go by now.

searchmartin4• 12 years ago

search google for mattcutts.com - you'll see another post of mine from last year, detailing some theory ;)

viraptor3• 12 years ago

Yes, I've seen you writing about it, but it was not done in the end. (at least not the link spamming that's mentioned in this article) Even worse, the article mentions "Any of those might work, but none are particularly reliable. Most actually stand a good chance of positively influencing their results instead." - which rather indicates that it's hard to do really negative SEO even if you try.

johnward6• 12 years ago

Yes but Google has ways to manually override things. You don't think Cutts could get that done? It would be better to target some poor unsuspecting blogger but that would be pretty cruel.

viraptor3• 12 years ago

Could Matt do that - sure. Would he do that straight away, faster than the results can be captured, or does he have constant monitoring of his page - I doubt it. Still - nobody even tried as far as I can tell.

nekitamo3• 12 years ago

Negative SEO only consistently works on smaller sites with a small amount of backlinks (less than 1000). The idea behind negative SEO is to use tools to build a large amount of spammy links, such that 99% of the link profile of a site is obvious spam. This is easily achieved with tools like Xrumrer and Scrapebox. Find a site with 1000 backlinks, build a few hundred thousand spammy backlinks to it, and watch it drop.

To do the same for mattcutts.com you would have to build hundreds of millions spam backlinks to "outspam" his millions of legitimate backlinks. This is nontrivial.

So the people at the mercy of Negative SEO are the people least equipped to defend themselves: small hobby site owners, webmasters with personal blogs, small businesses etc. You can easily knock out their sites from the SERPs and they would never know what happened. Larger sites are secure due to the nature of their large link profiles.

Personally I think all the fear over Negative SEO has been overblown. I've personally been able to knock sites out of the SERPs for a year or so, and so have many other blackhatters. However, people would much rather spend their precious time and resources improving their own sites to get to the top of the SERPs rather than knocking out the competition.

I don't think Negative SEO is ok. But I also don't think it's a big deal.

Isofarro14• 12 years ago

"So the people at the mercy of Negative SEO are the people least equipped to defend themselves: small hobby site owners, webmasters with personal blogs, small businesses etc."

There's a filter you've missed there - those people are only at the mercy of negative SEO when they stand in the way of an SEO practitioner and financial gain.

andrenotgiant• 12 years ago

I think you need to break your argument into two parts.

1. People ARE creating spammy links that point to competitor sites in the hopes of damaging their search rankings. - You have proven this.

2. As a result of a competitor creating spammy links to your site, your rankings in Google have been permanently negatively effected. - I don't think the data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation. Lots of moving parts in Google's algorithm, the internet, your site...

Did the site get warnings in Webmaster Tools? Did you go through the disavow links process? How long ago?

johnward6• 12 years ago

Do you think google can determine that your spammy link came from you or some other "seo"? I don't. There already is proof that these spammy links damage your ranking since penguin. Google even admitted it. That was the entire point of those updates. The only thing they have avoided is coming out and saying "negative SEO is a thing". As long as rank penalties exist negative SEO will exist.

SideburnsOfDoom• 12 years ago

The data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation.

As long as google keep the ranking details secret (i.e. always, with good reason) then absolute proof is hard.

You're right that "Correlation does not equal causation" but it don't discount correlation entirely either. This evidence is enough to treat the claims that negative SEO does not happen with extreme scepticism. The burden of proof has moved.

Given that there are penalties for some links, what is the mechanism that makes negative SEO non-existent? And how do you prove that this mechanism is infallible.

matnewton855• 12 years ago

Why are you even arguing with this? Do you have any experience with SEO?

I use negative SEO regularly to drop sites out of the top 10 in Google. I only target low quality sites that shouldn't be in there anyway, but Google in all their algorithmic wisdom has ranked them, so... I knock them out.

Low quality 5 page Adsense sites shouldn't outrank actual, legitimate businesses so it's just a case of click click, BOOM. I never target the actual competitors of my clients.

Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. It just has to be.

jacquesm39• 12 years ago

Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays.

The fact that you feel you represent the SEO professional community and that it is part of the standard toolkit to me is proof positive that the whole SEO community is a morally bankrupt bunch. It's just shades of gray all the way to 'black', parasitic rather than symbiotic and a net negative.

How you guys sleep at night is a mystery to me.

Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

We should be happy you exist so you can correct Google? And the fact that your paying customers rise accordingly is nothing but an unhappy coincidence?

I never target the actual competitors of my clients.

A so you're the kind of SEO that as some kind of public service improves the google index for his own gratification. Sorry, I don't but that for a second.

Absolutely incredible this comment, but thank you for owning up to it.

Feel free to list your customers here so I can make sure to never ever do business with any of them.

gk12• 12 years ago

To those reading the above post and wondering if this is acceptable behavior for SEO's: It isn't. It's called black-hat SEO, and it's full of people like this who pull dirty tricks without any shame. They even justify it to themselves--they're doing it because somebody's gotta do it, and everybody does it anyway!

normloman2• 12 years ago

"Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays."

Yes, because sabotaging your competitors with shady spamdexing practices fits most people's definition of "professional."

3RqGFE22ZMuOXNU• 12 years ago

I completely agree, someone needs to drop these low quality sites out of the top 10 in Google.

Here is a typical example of a website that I think needs negative SEOing:

http://www.matthewnewton.net/

scott_s• 12 years ago

The exchange, paraphrased:

andrenotgiant: I am unfamiliar with this area, so I need evidence to convince me that this technique makes a difference.

matnewton85: I am personally familiar with this area, and my personal experience says that this technique works.

So, the answer to your question is: because your personal experience does not qualify as evidence to someone else.

fuire8• 12 years ago

and who are to knock them out ?

johnward6• 12 years ago

There is no way negative SEO doesn't exist. As long as Google penalizes sites for link schemes those same schemes could be used against their competitors.

For example, say I'm running xrumer and spamming forums to increase my ranking, which was common pre-penguin. Google releases penguin and my sites rankings start to tank. So instead I switch to spamming my competitors links and Google penalizes them also. Good luck as a site owner trying to remove thousands of junk forum links especially when the forum owner thinks you were the spammer.

vijayaggarwal• 12 years ago

black hat SEO 2.0!

SeanDav• 12 years ago

I am no expert, but logically you could explain this behaviour of apparent negative SEO by Google discounting all links to "blue widgets" and the sites that market blue widgets that are now ranking higher, achieve this because of other links that are not being discounted by Google.

jgalt212• 12 years ago

Head of Google's Web Spam team is a position with too much power. For those dealing with Google, that's probably the second most powerful seat (after Larry/Sergey tie for first).

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. As such, no one person should occupy this seat for any significant tenure.

This comment is in no way a negative comment about Matt, just talking about the temptations one must face in such a powerful seat.

pistle• 12 years ago

Seems the SEO community might need to build a new b2b around punishing the blackhat SEO folks that attack their clients. SEO can go fight amongst itself to the death.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

I think there are two issues at play.

1) Google massively discounted exact match domains, so if you were ranking well before because of an EMD, don't expect to now.

2) Negative SEO has always been a possibility, but a lot of sites aren't helping themselves either.

For like a decade now, there have been plenty of shady link networks where you could get millions of links. It would not be difficult to get millions of spam links with the same anchor text and make it look like Blue Widgets was spamming.

It's not important whether a link is spammy or not, it matters if it's helping you rank better, is being discounted, or if it's penalizing you.

It is possible that those links existed before the Google updates and were helping blue widgets.com rank better. Then Google discounted the spammy links and the EMD, and now the site isn't ranking.

It's also possible that Google is penalizing those links.

In the end, spam links don't come with a great big attribution of how they got there, who put them there, and what the intent is.

A link is a vote. Just like votes, you can stuff the ballot box or you can make it look like your competitor is stuffing the ballot box.

In the end nobody is entitled to rank well on Google search for any reason at all. They could order by rand() tomorrow and you're up a creek.

underdown• 12 years ago

The exact match domain nerf was like two years ago.

tiglionabbit• 12 years ago

He could check how long the spam sites have existed by using archive.org.

tboyd47• 12 years ago

Lobbying Google to reverse course now is surely a lost cause. Google has a vested interest in improving the user experience of Google. Not the profitability of every other site that has a symbiotic relationship with Google by optimizing against their ranking system. So even if you do have a quality site, and they did open a door to allow your competitors to blast you with bunk backlinks, all this is completely hidden from Google's user base and so they ultimately don't care.

Maybe what website owners should do here, if they have lost considerable money, is file a class-action suit against Google. I'd actually be surprised if no one is doing this.

This is a really interesting subject, anyway. Thanks for the post. I would love to hear a follow-up about how people with web properties can guard against negative SEO. Maybe by keeping your site registered under multiple domains at a time? Or moving your content around on the same domain with permanent redirects? I dunno, it really seems like this is changing the whole industry.

logicallee3• 12 years ago

I think there's a very good argument to be made that negative SEO should be illegal, with punishment/compensation similar to that of slander and libel in the United States. (Which are incredibly specific, due to free speech issues.)

Why should slander and libel be illegal at all - why can't anyone say, claim, or publish anything they want whatsoever?

If you reflect on that the reason is fairly obvious.

Likewise, if negative SEO were illegal, it might have the same benefits.

Of course technically the standard would be much different from slander/libel, but the fundamental reason that we would limit free speech in this way is clear. It is just more damaging to the person being damaged than the limit on the free speech that it imposes costs us. (Which is taken seriously in the United States).

So, for this reason, there is a good argument to be made for specific, nuanced, laws against negative SEO in the form of civil penalties. I would support such a law.

Ryan_Jones2• 12 years ago

This takes us down a very slippery slope. Linking, is not illegal and I think we can all agree that the web would be ruined if simply adding a link to a site you own or control were made illegal.

So that raises the question: How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link? Pretty soon you'd have people arrested for linking to somebody's site from a news article or to/from sites like ripoffreport.

rlpb• 12 years ago

How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link?

By intent. Intent is something that law has always considered. No need for an exception here.

rplnt• 12 years ago

You can have that law in US.. and then what?

It might help in some cases, but people doing this probably aren't that stupid and would use foreign entity to do the dirty work if there was such law in effect.

newaccountfool2• 12 years ago

Making it illegal where? Worldwide? This is a ridiculous idea.

logicallee3• 12 years ago

it's a fairly ridiculous idea that slander and libel are "illegal". Yet when you explore it more deeply, you find some of the laws actually make sense.

mattmaroon• 12 years ago

I don't understand how negative SEO could not exist. Google is cracking down on people buying back links right? If I bought links for a competitor's website, wouldn't it stand to reason they'll be punished? Google has no idea who is doing the purchasing. (You could replace buying links with any action Google' algo punishes.)

As long as Google's algorithm has punitive measures in it from something that happens off of your site, it stands to reason a competitor could do those things on your behalf.

anonymfus• 12 years ago

For Google solution could be to penalise only for links placed before the date of update.

codeddesign• 12 years ago

how is this at the top of HN? this news is well over a year old

gscott4• 12 years ago

I have tested negative seo to force a couple of websites out of listing positions that I had once and it works fine. What you do is buy multiple 50k "xrumer" postings with "pingbacks" for that website you want gone. Add in some spammy Fiverr jobs plus buy some links for that website you want gone on Text-Link-Ads then report that website as having paid links. This method works 100% of the time. This creates such a firestorm of links a webmaster would have to spend a month trying to disavow them and a lot of times webmasters don't even know what disavow means. Google is so worried about spamming and punishing websites rather then just ignoring the bad data. Since Google is out to punish and Google... it's a computer program it can't tell one thing from another other then these junk links exist therefor the hammer must be brought down on the webmaster who has no idea of what is going on. This was a year or more ago but I promise that this would work fine today. The smaller the website the better it works. Try it against a mega website and this would be ineffective because of the ratio of good links that they have.

Isofarro14• 12 years ago

"This method works 100% of the time"

How many sites did you try this on? One?

In your existing setup, how many competitors could you take out now before Google notices the pattern you've adopted? Take a look at the footprint:

* Site suddenly acquires a new batch of incoming links

* Same site is reported for being a recipient of a paid-for links scheme

* Reporter uses the email address of (your email address here) -- I love the dichotomy of blackhats despising/hating Google, yet reaching out over and over again pretending to be a good citizen.

How many times and variations of that can you come up with before standing out? And when the pattern emerges, Google are in a position to re-address the balance.

This switch Google has done from inaction to penalty for spammy links has changed the spamming game. No positive benefit from spamming is a good thing. Spammers can only create negative damage with their existing setup, until they out themselves by being trackable/detectable.

bjterry2• 12 years ago

You are being insufficiently creative. If there are 10 competitors in your niche (and many will have more like 100), you can do this to five of them at random and google would have no way of determining who the perpetrator was. When you report them for paid-links, you wouldn't use your real e-mail address, that doesn't make any sense. There is no way to tell self backlinks from competitor backlinks. Both are attempted to be carried out in secret and in identical fashion from google's perspective. I could imagine a scenario where google sees that a niche has a bunch of people being targeted with backlinks, and so stops applying the penalty, but still they would have no way of targeting the bad actor.

gscott4• 12 years ago

I limited this to three websites, first being myself. There are a number of vendors who offer to promote your website but in such a horrific way that it blows your site up. That's is what I did with a site I was marketing I did it to myself, totally negative seo'd myself bad. It was awful and dumb too. So bad that Google didn't stop with just a notification they sent a special one saying "your site is harming the Internet" and they removed me totally couldn't find me by even searching a url.

I realized something powerful. I had the power to remove any website from Google. I could be a more evil Matt Cutt's. He can remove sites from Google and so can I.

It is a pretty awe inspiring power. It is like a terrible super power. I can "poof" a website gone from the source of around in my estimation about 90% of web traffic (Google's estimations are too low).

I was going to make a service offering my terrible super-power but decided not to. I relaunched the website I was working on and now never do anything dumb to myself. Now I pretty much only do social marketing because that is where Google is moving to. The days of lots of backlinks are pretty much over, I don't even bother except for making sure local profiles are all set up.

nkozyra• 12 years ago

If there is a way to be penalized via blackhat SEO there will always be the possibility of negative / competitive SEO.

drakaal• 12 years ago

I do reputation management at http://www.blackwaterops.com a large portion of that is "negative" SEO.

It doesn't all have to be "bad neighbor" linking. Negative SEO can be contacting the people who are lending authority to a link and getting them to "nofollow" or remove the link.

Negative SEO can also be convincing Google to AutoSuggest things that don't paint your competition in a good light. "Cheezy Poofs Calories" seems like things people might ask, but people will reconsider if they want Cheezy poofs if the top suggestions in Google's autocomplete is "Cheezy Poofs Explosive Diarrhea" or "Cheezy Poofs Rectum Rash" Or better yet both.

That all Said. Bad Neighbor penalties and the ability to get a site delisted by link bombing has been well known for a long time. Anything that you could do to try and get your self upranked but that is sketchy could also be used to get your competitor delisted.

One thing to note however, is that along the way typically that competitor gets insane rankings just before getting delisted. That isn't always worth it.

-Brandon Wirtz (I Google Bombed my Way to being Greatest Living American) http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2007/05/11/the-greatest-goo...

sudorank• 12 years ago

Negative SEO has been around for years, the mainstream SEO community have only just realised it.

It's going to be at-least another year until the exact methods are discovered though because of the reasons I detailed here:

http://www.sudorank.com/rand-fishkin-wont-ever-see-negative-...

Until then people's businesses will be burned and Google won't really do much about it, always slow to react!

J2B2• 12 years ago

I worked at an SEO firm that had a range of client sites, including two of the three companies with the largest search engines. As with every update a large amount of speculation, with little data analysis, would pop up.

Content, Improper site setup, canonical tags, robot.txt changes, there are a significant number of issues that can impact rankings.

Unfortunately, instead of checking these owners of the site would always speculate that the impact was due to some new factor that certain SEO firms would perpetuate for marketing purposes.

If your to learn anything from these types of articles, its know your audience and create content for them.

xor-ed-wolf• 12 years ago

This article is enlightening but offers no solutions or advices. Why had I read that?

tambourine_man• 12 years ago

We desperately need open and distributed database and search algorithms. As it stands now, we are at the mercy of a company's competence and benevolence.

Google is getting less usable by the day. Verbatim and code search don't work anymore and the relevance of results keep decreasing dispite the many revision animals they release.

Negative SEO Does Exist

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