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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

by 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.

by trevin 13y ago

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.