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This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need t

by tlogan 13y ago

This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted... I hope this is going to be fixed somehow. EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" or real problem?

moultano 13y ago
Do you have some examples?
- tlogan 13y ago
  No - but I heard people talking about that. Is this even possible?
  - jaredmck 13y ago
    I've not seen convincing evidence that negative seo works, besides a few sites where they were already super open to being penalized upon any review, or small sites without much seo holding up their few rankings. It's not likely to return much if other competition exists and could cost a lot to bump one of your competitors for a month maybe two?
nostromo 13y ago
It's hard to know if it's a real problem because when people are caught, it's hard to know if they're lying about how a competitor did it to screw them over. Anyway, here's what someone should do: Buy a bunch of spam links on fivver for keyword "matt cutts" and point it to his domain www.mattcutts.com. (He's one of the few people on Earth with plausible deniability regarding Google manipulation.) If you successfully remove his domain from spot one on Google, this is potentially a real problem.
- OGinparadise 13y ago
  His name probably has immunity, just as most large brands do. Small/er sites are fried. Deep fried.
  - RBerenguel 13y ago
    Immunity? There's no immunity (supposedly) inside the Google search algorithm. But of course, there's inertia. Big brands have a huge inertia: you can think of a big brand as having thousands or millions of small links that push its ranking up. That is very hard to overcome with these tactics, it's like stopping the sea with a teaspoon.
    - OGinparadise 13y ago
      Immunity? There's no immunity (supposedly) inside the Google search algorithm Almost certain that there is. After a certain internal Google score (?) it appears like no update will penalize you with things like 70% traffic drop out of the blue. Big brands are largely not effected by Google's many updates and even when they buy links etc they are forgiven very fast. Regular sites on the other hand are told generic nonsense as they lose visitors update after update.
      - codeka 13y ago
        Do you have anything to back that claim up? You're on hn every time there's a Google story talking about how they're killing smaller sites, acting monopolistic, violating anti-trust regulations or whatever, what is your motivation?
        arbuge 13y ago
        It makes sense there would be some kind of immunity. "Immunity" is probably the wrong word - I'd call it common sense. I would think Google has a simple lookup table which always places results like "bmw.com" #1 for query "bmw", "wikipedia.org" #1 for query "wikipedia", etc. irrespective of backlink profiles.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- npsimons 13y ago
  Thank you, I'm not the only one! Every time I see someone misspell it, it makes me think less of their intellectual capacity.
trevin 13y ago
It's a real problem. I do SEO for a living and work with hundreds of sites at a large agency. I've seen several hit with negative SEO from competitors ordering link gigs on Fiverr or asking some low quality link provider on Digital Point to build 10,000 links in a short period of time. This has killed rankings for a few sites that I've worked with. It is really easy to get thousands of spam/porn sites to link to a competitor with exact match anchor text for whatever keyword you want. And it's basically impossible to figure out which competitor is doing it to you. Google used to just 'devalue' all crap links pointing to a site. A link could never hurt you. Now that links can hurt your site, it's totally wide open for this type of thing to happen. Here's a good case study/experiment done on negative SEO if anybody is interested in further reading: http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-...
- arbuge 13y ago
  That case study is truly frightening. People spend years of their lives and millions of dollars to get their sites to rank higher in search engines... and then this can happen.
- jcampbell1 13y ago
  The pendulum has definitely swung the other way. It is now much easier to kill competitors with black hat tactics than it is to promote a business with black hat tactics. I remember a comment by Eric Schmidt that the best way to combat spam was through "brands". While brands are a component of good search results, I can't think of a more misguided philosophy. If the only advice Google has about where to buy something is to buy from "Amazon" then Google has lost its utility in revenue generating searches. I think the best way to combat SEO spam is through engineering and hard work. Giving all the power to established brands is a shortcut that will ultimately undermine Google's core value to its users.
deleted 13y ago
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by tlogan 13y ago

moultano 13y ago

Do you have some examples?

tlogan 13y ago
No - but I heard people talking about that. Is this even possible?
- jaredmck 13y ago
  I've not seen convincing evidence that negative seo works, besides a few sites where they were already super open to being penalized upon any review, or small sites without much seo holding up their few rankings. It's not likely to return much if other competition exists and could cost a lot to bump one of your competitors for a month maybe two?

nostromo 13y ago

It's hard to know if it's a real problem because when people are caught, it's hard to know if they're lying about how a competitor did it to screw them over. Anyway, here's what someone should do: Buy a bunch of spam links on fivver for keyword "matt cutts" and point it to his domain www.mattcutts.com. (He's one of the few people on Earth with plausible deniability regarding Google manipulation.) If you successfully remove his domain from spot one on Google, this is potentially a real problem.

OGinparadise 13y ago
His name probably has immunity, just as most large brands do. Small/er sites are fried. Deep fried.
- RBerenguel 13y ago
  Immunity? There's no immunity (supposedly) inside the Google search algorithm. But of course, there's inertia. Big brands have a huge inertia: you can think of a big brand as having thousands or millions of small links that push its ranking up. That is very hard to overcome with these tactics, it's like stopping the sea with a teaspoon.
  - OGinparadise 13y ago
    Immunity? There's no immunity (supposedly) inside the Google search algorithm Almost certain that there is. After a certain internal Google score (?) it appears like no update will penalize you with things like 70% traffic drop out of the blue. Big brands are largely not effected by Google's many updates and even when they buy links etc they are forgiven very fast. Regular sites on the other hand are told generic nonsense as they lose visitors update after update.
    - codeka 13y ago
      Do you have anything to back that claim up? You're on hn every time there's a Google story talking about how they're killing smaller sites, acting monopolistic, violating anti-trust regulations or whatever, what is your motivation?
      - arbuge 13y ago
        It makes sense there would be some kind of immunity. "Immunity" is probably the wrong word - I'd call it common sense. I would think Google has a simple lookup table which always places results like "bmw.com" #1 for query "bmw", "wikipedia.org" #1 for query "wikipedia", etc. irrespective of backlink profiles.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

npsimons 13y ago
Thank you, I'm not the only one! Every time I see someone misspell it, it makes me think less of their intellectual capacity.

trevin 13y ago

It's a real problem. I do SEO for a living and work with hundreds of sites at a large agency. I've seen several hit with negative SEO from competitors ordering link gigs on Fiverr or asking some low quality link provider on Digital Point to build 10,000 links in a short period of time. This has killed rankings for a few sites that I've worked with. It is really easy to get thousands of spam/porn sites to link to a competitor with exact match anchor text for whatever keyword you want. And it's basically impossible to figure out which competitor is doing it to you. Google used to just 'devalue' all crap links pointing to a site. A link could never hurt you. Now that links can hurt your site, it's totally wide open for this type of thing to happen. Here's a good case study/experiment done on negative SEO if anybody is interested in further reading: http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-...

arbuge 13y ago
That case study is truly frightening. People spend years of their lives and millions of dollars to get their sites to rank higher in search engines... and then this can happen.
jcampbell1 13y ago
The pendulum has definitely swung the other way. It is now much easier to kill competitors with black hat tactics than it is to promote a business with black hat tactics. I remember a comment by Eric Schmidt that the best way to combat spam was through "brands". While brands are a component of good search results, I can't think of a more misguided philosophy. If the only advice Google has about where to buy something is to buy from "Amazon" then Google has lost its utility in revenue generating searches. I think the best way to combat SEO spam is through engineering and hard work. Giving all the power to established brands is a shortcut that will ultimately undermine Google's core value to its users.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]