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The spammy links thing fascinates me. I don't know much about search algos or SEO but on our small, industrial business site we couldn't understand why, after m

The spammy links thing fascinates me. I don't know much about search algos or SEO but on our small, industrial business site we couldn't understand why, after many hours and thousands of dollars spent on the procedures that Google recommends, our organic ranking in SERPs for a very niche product (of which we are one of only three providers in our region) was appalling - often page three. It wasn't till we realised we had 10,000+ spammy links pointed at our site that we wondered whether we had been the victim of some malicious attack. We couldn't recover the penalty to the site no matter how hard we worked and have had to rebuild at a new domain as a result. For small businesses like us, is it really possible for a competitor to just destroy our online credibility like that or am I just paranoid?

Taek 10y ago
Nah, if there's money on the line there's a lot of reason to target you for a penalty. Scammy sites can't get attention if there's a legitimate site in the search results. SEO is a big industry and taking down competitors is a part of being the top N results.
- cconcepts 10y ago
  So how do I combat against this? We're a small, honest company providing great products and services for the companies that need them but we're getting killed online because no one can find us. I've forked out a lot (for us) on adwords and the return has been negligible to say the least. Does this mean that the democratizing power of the internet has been swallowed up for small, lean companies like us who cant afford a mega adwords budget?
  - maksimum 10y ago
    Try finding influencers with high pagerank (page 1-2 for your business type) and paying them to review/feature your products and link to your site.
  - reefoctopus 10y ago
    You have to disavow the bad links. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      Why is it that someone else gaming Google's algorithm becomes my problem and requires me to solve it rather than Google?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        For the same reason when some fellow citizen acts against you, you may need to sue them yourself - Google provides a platform with some set of rules, but they can't proactively ensure nobody is doing something malicious to other parties (especially if the malicious act is allowed by the rules), nor they can codify and enforce "don't be an asshole" rule.
        ubernostrum 10y ago
        Your analogy doesn't really hold up. This isn't another person coming after you directly, it's the other person manipulating a third party to cause the third party to come after you, and the third party saying "not my problem that I'm easy to manipulate like that". For a criminal-justice-system analogy, it's similar in concept (though not in extremity) to SWATting. And I don't think we want governments to wash their hands of that and say "not our fault our system is abusable that way, it's all on you to do something about it after the fact".
        jdietrich 10y ago
        Identity theft is a perfectly reasonable analogy. If someone steals my identity and ruins my credit rating, the onus is on me to inform the credit reference agency. It'd be nice if Equifax could telepathically divine whether a credit transaction was legitimate or not, but it simply isn't possible. Google are similarly unable to distinguish between a blackhat SEO scheme and this sort of weird SEO DDoS.
  - wusatiuk 10y ago
    you can definitely rank as a small business as well in the organic search results, without any adwords budgets, but SEO is not as easy as it was 6-8 years ago - that´s for sure. if you are interested, i can have a look at your company´s site and provide some ideas / feedback, if you want to.
- austenallred 10y ago
  I manage SEO for a company in a very competitive and spammy SEO space (payday loans). (A good guy trying to fix the space.) I spend an average of 10-15 hours/week disavowing bad links our competitors build. I've automated most of it now so it's going faster, but it's out of control.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
1) Update your Disavow file properly, which I am sure you've done 2) Email Google directly. It is sometimes difficult to find a way to email, but once you do they'll take care of it.
- cconcepts 10y ago
  Any suggestions on where to search for such an email address?
  - rokhayakebe 10y ago
    Frankly I do not remember, but if you look into the webmaster console help section hard enough you will end up finding a place, or you can also try reporting an issue via the Maps since it is a local business. What is certain is you can contact someone there and they are usually helpful once you do.
  - manfredz 10y ago
    Talk to one of their sales reps.
neya 10y ago
I second the other commenter's opinion on disavow-ing links. It did have a positive impact on one of my online properties. Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
- mikkom 10y ago
  If one would be a target of automated spammy link attack - let's say a competitor would order 100 spammy links a month for example 3 a day - how could one defend against this kind of attack? (I'm not in such situation, just speculating) What I'm wondering is how easy it is really to get to top at some more obscure search term by just using nasty black hat tactics. I'm also wondering if this is actually the easiest way to get top of search results. If that is the case than it's really alarming IMHO.
  - Twirrim 10y ago
    automated disavowing, maybe? Sucks, but may be necessary.
    - mikkom 10y ago
      But how could you know what links are real and what are not if not even google knows it? If you are trying to get legin backlinks at the same time then this would be almost impossible.
digi_owl 10y ago
I dunno how much it has evolved, but Google got started by weighting search results based on how many other pages linked to that page. More links and your pages was found closer to the top of the results page. So a easy way to game that was to set up "link farms" that pointed to each other, but not really offering anything worthwhile except a bunch of words people were likely to search for.
- FabHK 10y ago
  Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Raphmedia 10y ago
It's a sad situation but I can pay $5 on Fiverr to attack you that way. Google should really handle it better.
- BorisMelnik 10y ago
  they actually have, and have taken more steps to prevent this happening as of lately. (they also deny Negative SEO is a thing). Their latest update of the Penguin algorithm states it is more "granular" and also stated it will really only penalize the pages that have the bad links pointing to it, rather than the whole site. Small steps, I know but at least they are doing something it seems.
EdHominem 10y ago
Supposedly Google now doesn't count these as negatives, they just disregard them. Specifically because of this vulnerability.
thinkloop 10y ago
I wonder why google doesn't count spammy links as zero rather than negative.

Taek 10y ago

Nah, if there's money on the line there's a lot of reason to target you for a penalty. Scammy sites can't get attention if there's a legitimate site in the search results. SEO is a big industry and taking down competitors is a part of being the top N results.

cconcepts 10y ago
So how do I combat against this? We're a small, honest company providing great products and services for the companies that need them but we're getting killed online because no one can find us. I've forked out a lot (for us) on adwords and the return has been negligible to say the least. Does this mean that the democratizing power of the internet has been swallowed up for small, lean companies like us who cant afford a mega adwords budget?
- maksimum 10y ago
  Try finding influencers with high pagerank (page 1-2 for your business type) and paying them to review/feature your products and link to your site.
- reefoctopus 10y ago
  You have to disavow the bad links. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    Why is it that someone else gaming Google's algorithm becomes my problem and requires me to solve it rather than Google?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      For the same reason when some fellow citizen acts against you, you may need to sue them yourself - Google provides a platform with some set of rules, but they can't proactively ensure nobody is doing something malicious to other parties (especially if the malicious act is allowed by the rules), nor they can codify and enforce "don't be an asshole" rule.
      - ubernostrum 10y ago
        Your analogy doesn't really hold up. This isn't another person coming after you directly, it's the other person manipulating a third party to cause the third party to come after you, and the third party saying "not my problem that I'm easy to manipulate like that". For a criminal-justice-system analogy, it's similar in concept (though not in extremity) to SWATting. And I don't think we want governments to wash their hands of that and say "not our fault our system is abusable that way, it's all on you to do something about it after the fact".
        jdietrich 10y ago
        Identity theft is a perfectly reasonable analogy. If someone steals my identity and ruins my credit rating, the onus is on me to inform the credit reference agency. It'd be nice if Equifax could telepathically divine whether a credit transaction was legitimate or not, but it simply isn't possible. Google are similarly unable to distinguish between a blackhat SEO scheme and this sort of weird SEO DDoS.
- wusatiuk 10y ago
  you can definitely rank as a small business as well in the organic search results, without any adwords budgets, but SEO is not as easy as it was 6-8 years ago - that´s for sure. if you are interested, i can have a look at your company´s site and provide some ideas / feedback, if you want to.
austenallred 10y ago
I manage SEO for a company in a very competitive and spammy SEO space (payday loans). (A good guy trying to fix the space.) I spend an average of 10-15 hours/week disavowing bad links our competitors build. I've automated most of it now so it's going faster, but it's out of control.

rokhayakebe 10y ago

1) Update your Disavow file properly, which I am sure you've done 2) Email Google directly. It is sometimes difficult to find a way to email, but once you do they'll take care of it.

cconcepts 10y ago
Any suggestions on where to search for such an email address?
- rokhayakebe 10y ago
  Frankly I do not remember, but if you look into the webmaster console help section hard enough you will end up finding a place, or you can also try reporting an issue via the Maps since it is a local business. What is certain is you can contact someone there and they are usually helpful once you do.
- manfredz 10y ago
  Talk to one of their sales reps.

neya 10y ago

I second the other commenter's opinion on disavow-ing links. It did have a positive impact on one of my online properties. Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

mikkom 10y ago
If one would be a target of automated spammy link attack - let's say a competitor would order 100 spammy links a month for example 3 a day - how could one defend against this kind of attack? (I'm not in such situation, just speculating) What I'm wondering is how easy it is really to get to top at some more obscure search term by just using nasty black hat tactics. I'm also wondering if this is actually the easiest way to get top of search results. If that is the case than it's really alarming IMHO.
- Twirrim 10y ago
  automated disavowing, maybe? Sucks, but may be necessary.
  - mikkom 10y ago
    But how could you know what links are real and what are not if not even google knows it? If you are trying to get legin backlinks at the same time then this would be almost impossible.

digi_owl 10y ago

I dunno how much it has evolved, but Google got started by weighting search results based on how many other pages linked to that page. More links and your pages was found closer to the top of the results page. So a easy way to game that was to set up "link farms" that pointed to each other, but not really offering anything worthwhile except a bunch of words people were likely to search for.

FabHK 10y ago
Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Raphmedia 10y ago

It's a sad situation but I can pay $5 on Fiverr to attack you that way. Google should really handle it better.

BorisMelnik 10y ago
they actually have, and have taken more steps to prevent this happening as of lately. (they also deny Negative SEO is a thing). Their latest update of the Penguin algorithm states it is more "granular" and also stated it will really only penalize the pages that have the bad links pointing to it, rather than the whole site. Small steps, I know but at least they are doing something it seems.

EdHominem 10y ago

Supposedly Google now doesn't count these as negatives, they just disregard them. Specifically because of this vulnerability.

thinkloop 10y ago

I wonder why google doesn't count spammy links as zero rather than negative.