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How to Mitigate a Negative SEO Campaign?
- ramenmeal 7y ago> If a visitor's user agent doesn't match a selected search engine, the browser is redirected either to the hacked website's normal homepage, or to an evidently fake, recently created, online marketing website Could someone explain this bit to me? Don't follow it.
- Spivak 7y ago1. Site is compromised. 2. When a search engine crawler goes to the site it displays the attackers content. 3 When a ‘normal’ users visits the site it will display the original site or a generic marketing site. It’s a tactic to prevent the original owner from knowing their site was hacked.
- CodeWriter23 7y agoIt’s called cloaking. Spider gets one page, visitor gets a different one.
- walshemj 7y agoAnd search engines do check for this they don't only crawl as Googlebot.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chupa-chups 7y agoGoogle appears to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors (those which allowed google to surpass Altavista for example)
- thekyle 7y agoCould you be a little more specific? What mistakes are you referring to?
- Quarrel 7y agoI have various issues with google and the way they approach these issues, but they're not in the same galaxy as Altavista. Google surpassed Altavista because it fundamentally bought a better way of indexing with it, and survived to dominate because it paired that with an incredibly insightful path to revenue. Are memories really that short? (Am I really that old?) We can argue around the edges, but I think any modern search engine user would be amazed at how bad bad bad search engines were for the basics of answering your search query, before google.
- jacquesm 7y agoGoogle made a big hoopla about other search engines including paid results in their listings. Google would never do such a thing. Until they did.
- amscanne 7y agoGoogle clearly marks ads as ads. I believe the criticism was that search engines of the past would allow paid results to appear organic. Has Google started doing this and I’m unaware?
- jacquesm 7y agoGoogle was never going to add any ads in their SER section at all. So that went away. Then they kept on fiddling with how the ads are marked to make it harder to spot the ads, including using colors already in use for other UI elements in organic results. Then they started advertising their own properties in advantageous positions (at the top) whether or not the results were all that relevant, and did not mark these as ads.
- amscanne 7y ago> Then they started advertising their own properties in advantageous positions (at the top) whether or not the results were all that relevant, and did not mark these as ads. Where and when did this happen? I recall the early days of Google, and they always had the ads appear first. I agree that it used to be very clearly delineated from the rest of the results, and that this has become more subtle over time, but as I far as I know they have never been disguised or hidden, which is what you’re asserting here. Can you provide a specific example or screenshot?
- chc 7y agoI don't recall negative SEO campaigns being a major mistake Alta Vista made that allowed Google to surpass it.
- jameslk 7y agoIt sounds like the content is being duplicated, so I think the author can make copyright claims through the DMCA delisting tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard
- ikeboy 7y agoThis. And also send DMCA notices to the websites hosting it, should be able to get everything removed fairly quickly.
- judge2020 7y agoDMCA claims might not affect the ranking of the page (but whether or not it affects duplicate content checks is anyone's guess) since a search for free movies[0] shows the Lumen DMCA takedown notice[1], even on the first page of results. 0: https://www.google.com/search?q=watch+spider+man+online+free https://www.google.com/search?q=watch+spider+man+online+free 1: https://i.judge.sh/bright/CozyGlow/chrome_IJqvwxiRT1.png https://i.judge.sh/bright/CozyGlow/chrome_IJqvwxiRT1.png
- nickjj 7y agoOn a related topic, I wonder how Google can differentiate cases where your content is duplicated but the site duplicating it doesn't adhere to standards such as setting a canonical URL back to you and you as the "victim" are ok with the duplication. For example, a lot of popular podcast platforms will wrap your notes on their public crawlable site but don't set a canonical URL back to your site. From Google's POV this must look like duplicate content.
- joe_the_user 7y agoThe content is being repeatedly duplicated in random hacked websites. I presume that if the websites the person knew about were removed, others would pop-up. Edit: I don't see this approach having a ghost of a chance to work and it seems ignorant of the situation described in the OP.
- stevenicr 7y agoI spent some months occasionally doing these take down requests to the sites themselves via contact forms and admins listed in whois. Then waited, and then sent the requests to the listed hosts, then waited, then did things like the google de-listing.. A similar process was laid out on the recommendations for doing a 'disavow' thing with google webmaster tools - the amount of time all this takes is not trivial. Then, it happened again two months later, with a whole 'nother set of bad links from crappy sites. Since then, it pretty much happens about every month. a hundred or so new sites with crappy, likely expired or expiring domain names, where many appear to have names that would of once been used in the past for link ring seo - and likely were found to stop helping their clients sites and instead starting hurting - so now links are put towards ours. So it's about a 50 - 100 new ones every month. I've submitted so many take down requests and disavow lists - and the dumb specific utf formatting that they require - ugh. It's a mjow time suck - and with no way to tell what is helping or hurting. I suppose if your site was attacked once and left alone it would be worth the effort, but if someone is serious about taking you down, the effort is better spent not trying to please google and instead focusing on better places to get found like snap, insta, fbook ads, etc. admit - my experience small data point, ymmv for sure.
- Jack000 7y agoI've submitted threads like this to the google webmaster forum, and standard response boils down to: - negative seo doesn't work, google can tell the difference between spam links/sites - it's probably an issue with your own site (ie. the deranking is justified) - changes in rank are likely due to an algorithm update I'm not sure if the mods on that forum are even google employees - they seem to just be random users, not sure how they are selected. I've never seen anyone on that forum acknowledge that negative seo is effective.
- judge2020 7y agoForum posts by G employees will show "Google Employee" above their name as seen here (the recommended answer) https://support.google.com/nonprofits/thread/13880126?hl=en https://support.google.com/nonprofits/thread/13880126?hl=en
- vosper 7y agoI couldn’t quite tell from your comment: is your opinion that negative SEO is effective?
- Jack000 7y agoyes I think negative SEO is effective. Context matters though, it's probably more effective against newer sites, sites with a weak backlink profile, and sites with more "naturally spammy" content like SEO.
- sharkweek 7y agoExactly - a negative seo campaign against... REI’s website as a random example won’t do much. But it’s not impossible to nuke a new-ish domain or a small business’s domain with tons of bad links through spam services if you know what you’re doing.
- xwdv 7y agoI used to build negative SEO campaigns for clients a few years back and they were fairly effective, though I don’t know if that’s still the case today. I’m sure it probably is.
- throwaway744678 7y agoI think there are two possibilities here: - the original website is targeted by attackers seeking to push it down the Google results list - the original website is a side effect victim of spammy/malware infested websites who copy contents from successful pages to be listed in Google results and attract visitors. Does that second option make any sense?
- dazc 7y agoSince there isn't an obvious monetary incentive to push the site down, I'm thinking the second option makes a lot more sense? It's not uncommon for authoritative content to be plagiarized and one needs to be ever vigilant and be prepared to take direct action rather than relying upon the wisdom of google's algorithms (which seem to be almost wholly ineffective in terms of discriminating against such practices).
- epoch_100 7y agoThere may be a monetary incentive for a polygraph manufacturer to push the site down.
- jkoudys 7y agoThere are also hundreds of law enforcement agencies worldwide who rely on the myth of the "lie detector" in their interrogations.
- throwaway744678 7y agoNot worldwide, no. In the US mainly and perhaps a few others, but that's about it.
- tbabb 7y ago> Does that second option make any sense? No, because the hacked sites only display the fraudulent content to web crawlers, and explicitly hide it from legitimate users.
- arn 7y agoI'm not saying he doesn't have a problem, but his site does appear above the others in search results for that quotation. "The consensus view among scientists is that polygraph testing has no scientific basis" It's such a specific quotation that there aren't that many sites that have that text, so the spam sites are gonna appear. Now if those sites outrank his site for regular search terms "what is a polygraph" ... then that's a problem. But he didn't seem to indicate that's the case.
- giles_corey 7y agoThe spam sites that replicate the original page's content make the original page look like low value content, too.
- tedivm 7y agoHe does indicate it- > With the text of my homepage replicated across hundreds of such modified pages, it has essentially disappeared from Google for key search terms for the site, such as "polygraph."
- arn 7y agook. then right, it's the vaguer question of whether his site deserves to rank higher than it does for a particular term. on brief glance, it doesn't look like he optimizes for "polygraph". He does rank #1 for antipolygraph.
- CodeWriter23 7y agoI do not consider the question of whether actual authoritative content should outrank hacked pages with duplicate content to be ”vague”.
- arn 7y agobut that's not the issue here. There is no example where duplicate content is outranking his. In the quoted query, he ranks higher. Beyond that he says he doesn't rank well for "polygraph", but not that it's outranked by the spammy content.
- techaddict009 7y agoOne guy contacted me he was running Microsoft windows pirated key blog. Exactly the same thing. Since he was doing piracy he wasn't having guts to report to google. Everything was the same as you stated. Just difference was users coming from google were redirect to some site selling Microsoft keys. I tried to research it more but since it was related piracy I didn't want to get involved much. But still couldn't find any solution for it.
- Exuma 7y agoGoogle: Seen 3:24pm
- pkalinowski 7y agoOK, so what Google should do about it? From the outside view, you took your own website (and domain you own) and began low quality black hat SEO. It's like expecting Microsoft to step in when somebody got into your Windows computer by putting in correct password.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- spraak 7y agoYou've missed the point. This is more similar to identify theft.
- Thorrez 7y ago>From the outside view, you took your own website (and domain you own) and began low quality black hat SEO. Huh? The black hat SEO wasn't happening on his site, but on a ton of hacked sites unrelated to him.
- valley-green 7y agoThank you for pulling the curtain back on these dark actors. It’s important to be aware what’s going on.
- Yuval_Halevi 7y agoAround 1 year ago one of my sites got 'attacked' by a negative SEO campaign. It's annoying that it can happen. If someone wants to hurt your brand they can do it in more ways. Spam Reddit till a domain get blocked, buy cheap backlinks on Fiverr etc I'm not sure how well google is responding to negative SEO.
- teddyh 7y agoCui bono? That is, who could possibly benefit from hiding anti-polygraph sites? Why, only all the entities in the world who uses the polygraph to intimidate people; i.e. all the world’s collected military and intelligence agencies, plus any really large corporations either with ties to them or who uses the polygraph themselves. I don’t think he can expect any help from Google.
- bjterry 7y agoThat response is insane. How on earth could he substantiate it further than the significant evidence he presented? Would it require an admission of guilt from the responsible party?
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y agoWhy is Google still taking 301 redirects at face value?! They were doing that 15 years ago and it was causing headaches back then... Faked pagerank 9 domains used to pull a pretty penny on ebay...