11 ms·

Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

215 points by adzeds 13y ago

leephillips 13y ago
Somehow it seems unfair for Google to suggest that people spend time with the disavowal tool to correct deficiencies in Google's algorithms.
- arbuge 13y ago
  Especially when a competitor could buy 1000s of these links for $20 on a place like fiverr. Are we supposed to spend the rest of our lives disavowing this stuff? Edit: the 1000s figure is not an exaggeration. Go to fiverr and search on "back link" to see.
  - ramayac 13y ago
    Really?, wow... I had no idea about that. I bought some followers for a client once, but "1000's of links" for $20 sounds surreal (at least for me!)
    - ambiate 13y ago
      You would be really shocked at what $20 can get you in some communities. You might have inspired me to do some writing on the subject.
    - hellweaver666 13y ago
      it's mostly automated comment spam, forum spam and the like.
      - johnjlocke 13y ago
        75% of those links won't even be valid, so you really do get what you pay for on Fiverrrrrrrrr.
  - nhebb 13y ago
    Google gives instruction on how to do it in bulk [0]. You can: - Download your links from webmaster tools. - Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links. - Use the disavow tool [1] to upload the file. (If your livelihood depends a lot on organic traffic, that is one scary red button. The wording on the page coupled with the button text makes it sound like you will disavow all the links to your website.) [0] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... [1] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?p...
    - arbuge 13y ago
      Not really a "bulk" solution at all... "- Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links." That's the part where intensive manual labor comes in, weeding through those links one by one.
      - nhebb 13y ago
        Oh, I know. I guess we're supposed to be thankful for being able to submit a single file, though. I also noticed that the help page states "(the file type must be .txt and it must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII)". How many non-technical people even know what that means?
        jlgreco 13y ago
        How many websites that are concerned with SEO cannot find somebody who can know what that means for them? And what are the chances that if somebody doesn't know what that means they will mess it up? It is not like UTF-8/ASCII is something that you have to go out of your way to choose.. it is going to be what is defaulted to.
        leephillips 13y ago
        What if you've never heard of SEO but are being attacked by competitors planting spam links, taking advantage of Google's broken algorithms?
- jacquesm 13y ago
  Even more so if those links have previously been placed by people in their pay! So: company pays crap SEO to place spam links all over the globe to increase google rank google increases page rank crap SEO works a bit more together with 1000's of fellow crap SEOs google increases page rank google notices problem, starts penalizing sites with crap ranks companies that previously employed crap SEO to spam now pay crap SEO to blackmail site owners previously used to place spam links on to remove links 'or else'. Really, this is not a good development. The burden of dealing with spam is bad enough, now we need to deal with being blackmailed by SEO spammers to clean up after them as well or risk being penalized in google? wtf?
ckluis 13y ago
Matt if you read hackernews. This is bullshit. Spam links should count for 0 value not negative value.
- pinko 13y ago
  How about just asking, "Hey Matt, can you say something about why you decided spam links should count for negative value instead of 0?" I've never met him, but as demonstrated by his long HN profile, Matt is clearly a nice guy. He's also smart, so he probably thought this exact case through. None of us outside Google really know how this works. None of that means his group didn't make a poor decision in this case, but let's see if we can talk like adults and can learn more before going all "OMFG this is bllsht" on him...
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - larrys 13y ago
    "Matt is clearly a nice guy." In a sense he plays the role of a politician. Not able to do much (he is only one google guy after all) and trying to keep the masses feeling that he is acting in their best interest. He can't really be blamed. The bottom line is that none of this has any impact on google anyway. If anything it simply pushes more people to want to pay for paid placement.
- josefresco 13y ago
  While I tend agree, it sounds too obvious to be a solution. I would suggest that because Google can't detect all bad links, they want to make the ones they do detect "hurt" more. If Google simply zeroed out negative links there would be no repercussions for webmasters building massive amounts of bad links. Sort of like throwing link pasta against the wall. If you build enough crappy links, you will eventually find areas of the web Google has yet to police, therefore you're always slightly ahead. With penalties in place, those bad links might not be worth building because the penalties will outweigh the benefits of building massive amounts of low quality bad links.
- 13y ago
mikescoffield 13y ago
This seems like an open invite for people to create blatant spam content.
arbuge 13y ago
The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me. If spam links count for negative value you get competitors doing negative seo by buying cheap bad links to competing websites in bulk via places like fiverr. If they count for zero value then you get webmasters trying their luck by buying the same stuff themselves - who knows, there could be a good link amongst all the bad stuff and no harm in trying... Something other than ranking by inbound links seems to be needed at this point.
- larrys 13y ago
  "The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me." Imagine thinking that the "honor system" would actually not be gamed! Pagerank was designed a long time ago and suffers from a way of thinking that academics such as Page and Brin have. The same thing happened with email once the cat got out of the bag on that. Or on craigslist.org - Bottom line is not anticipating what would happen when widespread use of a product occurs and the user base changes significantly.
  - pfortuny 13y ago
    It looks like it was devised without security in mind. This is something we are starting to learn not to do. In that sense, TCP, the routing protocols, DNS &c were all designed that way (without malicious users in mind). Which for some time was very good and then BANG! I guess software engineering has to start dealing with this issue in a scientific way as well. And so academics will start thinking 'correctly', if this is possible.
  - codeulike 13y ago
    Designing things that are secure and un-gameable while still usable is actually very difficult.
  - tomjen3 13y ago
    Well the cure is pretty simple. You can apply pagerank in to calculate the reputation of each site and then multiply that number with the value of the outgoing link, using normal page rank. How do you get the reputation information? Well you need a network of creators, people, so that you can capture the social interactions between them.
adorable 13y ago
How can Google detect if a spammy link has been created by the site's owner or by a competitor? I don't see any way to detect that - apart from asking webmasters to report spammy backlinks. But that really isn't sustainable.
- disinterest 13y ago
  This is Google for you. They can use an army of automatons to achieve their goals and the rest of us have to use human power to clean up their mess.
skyraider 13y ago
Does anyone know if it's always the case that you can find spammy links to your site by using Google (e.g. link:mysite.com)? My link count in webmaster tools is an order of magnitude higher than the inbound links that I can find by using the search engine.
- SquareWheel 13y ago
  link: shows a limited subset, to prevent stealing competitor's links. Webmasters/Analytics should show everything though.
- adorable 13y ago
  As far as I've seen, the links you'll find through the search engine are a limited set of links from "important" pages (i.e. not the spammy ones). To find your spammy backlinks you'd have to use webmaster tools.
  - skyraider 13y ago
    Right now, it seems GWT only shows a "sample" of links, and that sample is chosen from the 100 domains that link most frequency. GWT's "total links" count for my site is about 75x larger than the number of links they'll give me. I'm wondering if it's a spammer registering a whole bunch of spammy domains. GWT doesn't seem to allow me to discover what all of these links are, so I couldn't disavow them even if I wanted to.
- trevin 13y ago
  Google's WT index seems to provide a fair amount of the links. There are a few 3rd party tools that do a really good job of indexing nearly all of the backlinks to your site: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org http://www.opensiteexplorer.org http://www.ahrefs.com http://www.ahrefs.com http://www.majesticseo.com http://www.majesticseo.com
  - skyraider 13y ago
    Thanks, opensiteexplorer displays about 75x more links that GWT does. Great stuff.
pfortuny 13y ago
"It is impossible". "It is quite difficult". "We work hard to prevent it". It is exactly the same as behaviour security companies had in the past until they learned that, to quote Adidas, 'impossible is nothing' and that 'quite difficult' is nonsense due to automation. It used to be quite difficult to stage a DOS (anyone remembers the first one Yahoo! suffered in 2000?, ah, those were the days when we were surprised by them...). Nowadays a bunch of kiddies can put amazon down on its knees. Well, probably not amazon.
- benbeltran 13y ago
  "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" - (attributed to John Maynard Kaynes) The algorithm has changed. The web has changed. Naturally, google has changed.
  - pfortuny 13y ago
    It is not a problem of a change in reality. It is a problem of wrong statements: 'It is impossible' is certainly false on the internet for almost anything you can think. 'It is very difficult': See the sysjail fiasco [1]. Once something is deemed possible, it is not very difficult, on computer systems. So, it is not the facts that have changed, it is their perception by Google. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysjail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysjail
    - benbeltran 13y ago
      Or, the ranking algorithm was previously designed for this not to have an impact, and as real-world usage showed abuse, they changed it. Repeat this cycle until now. So the techniques to game the algorithm changed, hence the algorithm changed, hence the stance changed... Constantly, we don't live in a static web. (EDIT: Also of note is the fact that this change was from a year ago, and the previous one was in 2003 ... So. Yeah)
shawnz 13y ago
It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something. In Google's eyes, having false negatives is worth not having false positives, and that's just the reality of the web. Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog.
- adorable 13y ago
  > Besides, it seems to me like these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog. or by all the people who have a site with traffic coming from Google
- damoncali 13y ago
  The government may some day think otherwise. Google's monopoly on search is substantial enough that they risk much by eschewing fairness in favor of quality. I would tread very lightly if I were in Google's shoes.
  - magicalist 13y ago
    Good luck defining "fairness". That regulation is going to go really well.
    - Finster 13y ago
      The Federal Government never let a little thing like undefinability stop them before.
    - damoncali 13y ago
      I hate the word myself as it means little outside of sports. However, there is a very real perception of "fairness", and often the status quo defines that perception. Whatever changes Google makes will be interpreted as unfair by someone, and given their dominant status - that could be a problem if enough people get nervous.
deleted 13y ago
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dbla 13y ago
Why does google need to penalize sites for spammy inbound links? Couldn't they instead just make those links not contribute at all (not penalize the ranking but not boost it at all either)? I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but I'm curious.
- rubinelli 13y ago
  Simply ignoring spammy links doesn't reduce link spam, because people still have an incentive to keep spamming in the off chance that some of those links will be considered valid.
eddywebs 13y ago
The article is inaccurate read between the lines of the comments.
ScottWhigham 13y ago
Somewhat of a sidebar, but what's to prevent the following: 1) You buy 1000 links for $5 [1] 2) You enjoy a brief rise in the rankings 3) Google catches on and penalizes you 4) You use the link disavow tool to effectively say, "We didn't do it! A competitor did it to us!" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5813496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5813496
- sharkweek 13y ago
  We're seeing a lot of this tactic in a lot of the more... difficult industries right now with super high value terms (payday loans, viagra, etc). What is hot and popular is doing exactly 1-3 except on a hyper-rotation of domains. Build up a bunch of shitty websites, get them ranking for a few weeks, they inevitably get penalized, then just switch domains and rinse and repeat.
- davedx 13y ago
  Why would you enjoy a brief rise in the rankings from something that causes 'negative SEO'? Surely these inbound links either harm or help you, not both?
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    Inbound links don't immediately get detected as negative. That takes a while.
slig 13y ago
In the Google Webmaster's tools it's possible to download a list of all the new links that are linking to your site. Using this tool I've been able to discover that someone has started to buy spammy links in wordpress comments linking to my website. Those wordpress blogs are full of spam, so I want to believe that Google is already ignoring everything there.
trevin 13y ago
The most frustrating part of negative SEO or any link cleanup is that Google doesn't tell which links they think are spammy links. If you are working for/with a site that has been online for a while, they will have thousands of crappy looking links pointing to their site. Scraper sites pick up content from other websites all the time and cross post with porn and other crap. Directory submissions that were perfectly fine 5 or 10 years ago can now be viewed as "low quality" by Google. Blogs that used to be well-maintained have been bought by spammers and SEOs and are now content farms. Google's lack of transparency when it comes to links is very troublesome. I understand they can't give out the ins and outs of their algo, but asking your average website owner to go through 10k+ backlinks and identify and remove the links is a pretty tall task when there isn't a clear standard on what is bad and what isn't.
carl689 13y ago
The article has some user comments I found relevant I don't see pointed out here. "That change was actually made a year ago. The only change on that page is the positioning of the video. The actual text has not changed in over a year."-Barry Schwartz AND "The article is also incredibly wrong about the previous change. Google did't add the "almost" last year (2012) but TEN years ago, in 2003, as you can see with Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20030915000000*/http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html http://web.archive.org/web/20030915000000*/http://www.google... -LowLevel
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
The amazing thing is that this is news. Of course competitors can trash your organic rankings -- and it's a lot easier for them to trash you than it is to promote themselves. I'm glad Google is slowly coming around to admitting that this house of mirrors has some flaws. The more information publishers get about this, the better choices we can make in content selection.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  A confirmation of fact is less relevant than peoples assumptions? What you seem to be suggesting is that information that people cannot be 100% sure of is perfectly valid, and reasonable to base decisions on. But, when that information is confirmed to be true, that has not enough value to report. I simply do not understand or accept that way of thinking.
- btilly 13y ago
  What is news here is not that negative SEO exists. It is that Google has been forced to admit that it is a real issue. Edit: After reading the comments at the end of the story, magicalist is right. The story is wrong, Google made this change a lot longer than a week ago, it isn't actually news.
  - magicalist 13y ago
    ...10 years ago.
    - btilly 13y ago
      No, last week. So it really is news. That's when their help page went from saying, "There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." to "Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." In other words from saying, "Don't worry about it" to "We're on it".
      - magicalist 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
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hippich 13y ago
I believe true way of dealing with spam links for Google would be ignore these. It will solve several problems at once: prevent spammed websites getting into index, prevent legitimate websites getting banned because of negative seo, make "seo specialist" job become a joke, and people eventually give up paying for it. Google on the other hand tries to punish, i.e. to scare away potential gamers, instead of ignoring these. I believe this is wrong and inefficient approach.
damon_c 13y ago
It would be interesting if Google let us optionally search using the original pure pagerank search from 10 years ago. Would it be like turning off spam filtering on email?
jonknee 13y ago
Negative SEO and negative click fraud (a competitor clicking on my AdSense ads fraudulently) are the two biggest things that keep me up at night. It's terrifying knowing that something so simple can take me out overnight and there's nothing I can do to prevent it. I'm surprised this hasn't become more like DDOS where thugs blackmail webmasters into submission with the threat of taking them offline. Or maybe it has and I just haven't heard...
btilly 13y ago
Weird evil conspiracy idea. The more people use negative SEO and their victims use Google's tools to disavow it, the worse Bing's results get.
ywang0414 13y ago
Any system can be cheated. Nothing here.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
I think the more scary thing here is it's incredibly easy and dirt cheap to completely bury your competitors with bad SEO. Think of a multi-million dollar company wanting to dispose of smaller competitors. For even a modest outlay of say $1000, you could do incredible, long-term damage to other companies web sites. Also, I'm pretty sure Google has no plans to update their algorithm to account for this huge flaw either, making every company vulnerable to attack from anybody.
programminggeek 13y ago
Here is probably the best thing I can sy about dealing with SEO... you should care a little, but you should really stop caring a lot. What I mean is, you should totally care about SEO, and doing basic, simple things like targeting long tail traffic, some simple content syndication/distribution/guest posting, but mostly I've seen that the best results are the outcome of an ongoing process, not the fad of the day. Creating content, being smart about it, but ignoring the day to day ebbs and flows of the SEO world will make you a much happier person because in most cases, your competition isn't doing anything at all, so putting any effort in at all is almost a win by default.
adventured 13y ago
The solution here is dead simple. Shitty links should have no SEO value, rather than a negative value. That eliminates the problem of people using bad links to hurt their competition.
- JangoSteve 13y ago
  But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain. Which would probably make the practice much more widespread.
  - adventured 13y ago
    Initially it would. If Google is any good at scoring links webmasters would quickly figure out the non-benefit and would stop. And Google could feel free to be overly harsh in making links neutral in value. Better to miss to the middle, than to miss to the negative and punish good sites being bombed with spam links by competitors. Aka first do no harm.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain. Well, nothing to lose except money: to discourage this, you just have to have links-of-unknown-quality produce no benefit, and links-with-positive-quality provide positive value; this is better than links of unknown value providing positive value and links with negative quality providing negative value.
macspoofing 13y ago
Is it me, or has HN been invaded by SEO consultants (case in point: OP). There's quite a bit more SEO-related topics these days. It seems to have started a few months ago, and it's getting worse.
deleted 13y ago
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kbojody 13y ago
Currently the linked Article redirects to a removed page. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2272092/Page-Removed http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2272092/Page-Removed Here is a cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2272092/Google-Confirms-Negative-SEO-Exists http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
rainhacker 13y ago
"This page has been removed due to inaccuracies. We regret the error."
jrochkind1 13y ago
"This page has been removed due to inaccuracies. We regret the error." hmm?
ekanes 13y ago
One way Google could mitigate this would be if webmasters could tell Google about new/expected links. Obviously some links are unexpected (great!) but if Google new you weren't trying to add 50 links, and 50 links showed up, perhaps they could take that into account.
dragonwriter 13y ago
Seems to me the general solution to negative SEO is instead of an unknown-quality-link bonus and a bad-link penalty, unknown-quality links should have no value and good links should have positive value. The problem is it is probably harder to split the world into probably-good vs. unknown links rather than probably-bad vs. unknown links.
kushti 13y ago
Hey, Google, what's about "Don't be evil" populism ?
csomar 13y ago
Wait a second, why doesn't Google just count the link juice of these links are 0 (null). This doesn't benefit the spammer, and it doesn't kill the innocent. Am I missing something here?
Matt_Cutts 13y ago
Note: this article is over a year old. The article makes it sound as if this is some new pronouncement, but it's really not. I've been using the language mentioned in this article since 2010, at least: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/#comment-485916 http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/... where I said "we’ve said in the past that we work very hard to prevent competitor A from hurting competitor B." The change on the official guidelines comes from a tech writer noticing that I normally say "we work hard to prevent this" and asking back in February 2012 if we should update the language on that page. I said yes and the language changed in March 2012. It looks like this article is from April 2012. One of the big reasons we say softer things (rather than "it's impossible") regarding the idea of negative SEO is that we have seen people to pretty crazy things to steal/hijack domain names in the past, like the bizarre history of sex.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com People talk about negative SEO far more than people actually attempt it, because you're never quite sure what effect (say) pointing some links to a site might have--it might help the site instead of hurting it--plus it's typically a better use of your time to develop your own site. But if there's a site that is worried about negative SEO, the site can disavow any links they want using our the disavow tool in Google's Webmaster Tools. You can even sort to see the most recent links if you're worried that this is something that just started. The primary usage of the disavow tool is so that a site can disavow bad linking that the site did itself and can't get removed from the web, but the disavow tool also works fine to disavow links that you're worried might be spammy.
- Caligula 13y ago
  It just seems like such a bizarre game we are required to play. I am picturing you jeering at us to "dance monkey dance".
- lingben 13y ago
  Matt, no amount of hand-waving will convince people when there is ample evidence of negative SEO, including meticulous case studies published online. As well, the very fact that Google has given in and introduced the disavow tool, it is incontrovertible proof that negative SEO is effective. Google had a good run but you have not been able to keep up with those who have striven day and night to beat your algos. The question is, can google play catch up? and do so in time? Several billions of dollars are riding on that question.
scottgerri 13y ago
Nowadays, Social bookmarking and Directory submission are important and great way to get traffic and all source..
Levigneron 13y ago
Bonjour Je viens de recevoir après avoir demandé un réexamen de mon site (maison-eco-malin . c o m) une réponse de Google, que mon site n’est toujours pas conforme ! Identifiant du message : [WMT-81011] J’ai envoyé un fichier pour désavouer un grand nombre de liens non désirés Mais rien ne change ! Je me retrouve avec des liens de sites bizarres sans rapport avec mon site. Comme des liens de sites sexuelle voir porno, de testes de sites, ect… Savez-vous comment arrêter cela ? Comment empêcher de faire de mauvais liens vers mon site ? Comment expliquer à Google que j’y suis pour rien ? Bonne journée Cordialement E.Levigneron

215 points by adzeds 13y ago

Somehow it seems unfair for Google to suggest that people spend time with the disavowal tool to correct deficiencies in Google's algorithms.

arbuge 13y ago
Especially when a competitor could buy 1000s of these links for $20 on a place like fiverr. Are we supposed to spend the rest of our lives disavowing this stuff? Edit: the 1000s figure is not an exaggeration. Go to fiverr and search on "back link" to see.
- ramayac 13y ago
  Really?, wow... I had no idea about that. I bought some followers for a client once, but "1000's of links" for $20 sounds surreal (at least for me!)
  - ambiate 13y ago
    You would be really shocked at what $20 can get you in some communities. You might have inspired me to do some writing on the subject.
  - hellweaver666 13y ago
    it's mostly automated comment spam, forum spam and the like.
    - johnjlocke 13y ago
      75% of those links won't even be valid, so you really do get what you pay for on Fiverrrrrrrrr.
- nhebb 13y ago
  Google gives instruction on how to do it in bulk [0]. You can: - Download your links from webmaster tools. - Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links. - Use the disavow tool [1] to upload the file. (If your livelihood depends a lot on organic traffic, that is one scary red button. The wording on the page coupled with the button text makes it sound like you will disavow all the links to your website.) [0] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... [1] https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?p...
  - arbuge 13y ago
    Not really a "bulk" solution at all... "- Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links." That's the part where intensive manual labor comes in, weeding through those links one by one.
    - nhebb 13y ago
      Oh, I know. I guess we're supposed to be thankful for being able to submit a single file, though. I also noticed that the help page states "(the file type must be .txt and it must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII)". How many non-technical people even know what that means?
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        How many websites that are concerned with SEO cannot find somebody who can know what that means for them? And what are the chances that if somebody doesn't know what that means they will mess it up? It is not like UTF-8/ASCII is something that you have to go out of your way to choose.. it is going to be what is defaulted to.
        leephillips 13y ago
        What if you've never heard of SEO but are being attacked by competitors planting spam links, taking advantage of Google's broken algorithms?
jacquesm 13y ago
Even more so if those links have previously been placed by people in their pay! So: company pays crap SEO to place spam links all over the globe to increase google rank google increases page rank crap SEO works a bit more together with 1000's of fellow crap SEOs google increases page rank google notices problem, starts penalizing sites with crap ranks companies that previously employed crap SEO to spam now pay crap SEO to blackmail site owners previously used to place spam links on to remove links 'or else'. Really, this is not a good development. The burden of dealing with spam is bad enough, now we need to deal with being blackmailed by SEO spammers to clean up after them as well or risk being penalized in google? wtf?

ckluis 13y ago

Matt if you read hackernews. This is bullshit. Spam links should count for 0 value not negative value.

pinko 13y ago
How about just asking, "Hey Matt, can you say something about why you decided spam links should count for negative value instead of 0?" I've never met him, but as demonstrated by his long HN profile, Matt is clearly a nice guy. He's also smart, so he probably thought this exact case through. None of us outside Google really know how this works. None of that means his group didn't make a poor decision in this case, but let's see if we can talk like adults and can learn more before going all "OMFG this is bllsht" on him...
- deleted 13y ago
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- larrys 13y ago
  "Matt is clearly a nice guy." In a sense he plays the role of a politician. Not able to do much (he is only one google guy after all) and trying to keep the masses feeling that he is acting in their best interest. He can't really be blamed. The bottom line is that none of this has any impact on google anyway. If anything it simply pushes more people to want to pay for paid placement.
josefresco 13y ago
While I tend agree, it sounds too obvious to be a solution. I would suggest that because Google can't detect all bad links, they want to make the ones they do detect "hurt" more. If Google simply zeroed out negative links there would be no repercussions for webmasters building massive amounts of bad links. Sort of like throwing link pasta against the wall. If you build enough crappy links, you will eventually find areas of the web Google has yet to police, therefore you're always slightly ahead. With penalties in place, those bad links might not be worth building because the penalties will outweigh the benefits of building massive amounts of low quality bad links.
13y ago

mikescoffield 13y ago

This seems like an open invite for people to create blatant spam content.

arbuge 13y ago

The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me. If spam links count for negative value you get competitors doing negative seo by buying cheap bad links to competing websites in bulk via places like fiverr. If they count for zero value then you get webmasters trying their luck by buying the same stuff themselves - who knows, there could be a good link amongst all the bad stuff and no harm in trying... Something other than ranking by inbound links seems to be needed at this point.

larrys 13y ago
"The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me." Imagine thinking that the "honor system" would actually not be gamed! Pagerank was designed a long time ago and suffers from a way of thinking that academics such as Page and Brin have. The same thing happened with email once the cat got out of the bag on that. Or on craigslist.org - Bottom line is not anticipating what would happen when widespread use of a product occurs and the user base changes significantly.
- pfortuny 13y ago
  It looks like it was devised without security in mind. This is something we are starting to learn not to do. In that sense, TCP, the routing protocols, DNS &c were all designed that way (without malicious users in mind). Which for some time was very good and then BANG! I guess software engineering has to start dealing with this issue in a scientific way as well. And so academics will start thinking 'correctly', if this is possible.
- codeulike 13y ago
  Designing things that are secure and un-gameable while still usable is actually very difficult.
- tomjen3 13y ago
  Well the cure is pretty simple. You can apply pagerank in to calculate the reputation of each site and then multiply that number with the value of the outgoing link, using normal page rank. How do you get the reputation information? Well you need a network of creators, people, so that you can capture the social interactions between them.

adorable 13y ago

How can Google detect if a spammy link has been created by the site's owner or by a competitor? I don't see any way to detect that - apart from asking webmasters to report spammy backlinks. But that really isn't sustainable.

disinterest 13y ago
This is Google for you. They can use an army of automatons to achieve their goals and the rest of us have to use human power to clean up their mess.

skyraider 13y ago

Does anyone know if it's always the case that you can find spammy links to your site by using Google (e.g. link:mysite.com)? My link count in webmaster tools is an order of magnitude higher than the inbound links that I can find by using the search engine.

SquareWheel 13y ago
link: shows a limited subset, to prevent stealing competitor's links. Webmasters/Analytics should show everything though.
adorable 13y ago
As far as I've seen, the links you'll find through the search engine are a limited set of links from "important" pages (i.e. not the spammy ones). To find your spammy backlinks you'd have to use webmaster tools.
- skyraider 13y ago
  Right now, it seems GWT only shows a "sample" of links, and that sample is chosen from the 100 domains that link most frequency. GWT's "total links" count for my site is about 75x larger than the number of links they'll give me. I'm wondering if it's a spammer registering a whole bunch of spammy domains. GWT doesn't seem to allow me to discover what all of these links are, so I couldn't disavow them even if I wanted to.
trevin 13y ago
Google's WT index seems to provide a fair amount of the links. There are a few 3rd party tools that do a really good job of indexing nearly all of the backlinks to your site: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org http://www.opensiteexplorer.org http://www.ahrefs.com http://www.ahrefs.com http://www.majesticseo.com http://www.majesticseo.com
- skyraider 13y ago
  Thanks, opensiteexplorer displays about 75x more links that GWT does. Great stuff.

pfortuny 13y ago

"It is impossible". "It is quite difficult". "We work hard to prevent it". It is exactly the same as behaviour security companies had in the past until they learned that, to quote Adidas, 'impossible is nothing' and that 'quite difficult' is nonsense due to automation. It used to be quite difficult to stage a DOS (anyone remembers the first one Yahoo! suffered in 2000?, ah, those were the days when we were surprised by them...). Nowadays a bunch of kiddies can put amazon down on its knees. Well, probably not amazon.

benbeltran 13y ago
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" - (attributed to John Maynard Kaynes) The algorithm has changed. The web has changed. Naturally, google has changed.
- pfortuny 13y ago
  It is not a problem of a change in reality. It is a problem of wrong statements: 'It is impossible' is certainly false on the internet for almost anything you can think. 'It is very difficult': See the sysjail fiasco [1]. Once something is deemed possible, it is not very difficult, on computer systems. So, it is not the facts that have changed, it is their perception by Google. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysjail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysjail
  - benbeltran 13y ago
    Or, the ranking algorithm was previously designed for this not to have an impact, and as real-world usage showed abuse, they changed it. Repeat this cycle until now. So the techniques to game the algorithm changed, hence the algorithm changed, hence the stance changed... Constantly, we don't live in a static web. (EDIT: Also of note is the fact that this change was from a year ago, and the previous one was in 2003 ... So. Yeah)

shawnz 13y ago

It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something. In Google's eyes, having false negatives is worth not having false positives, and that's just the reality of the web. Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog.

adorable 13y ago
> Besides, it seems to me like these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog. or by all the people who have a site with traffic coming from Google
damoncali 13y ago
The government may some day think otherwise. Google's monopoly on search is substantial enough that they risk much by eschewing fairness in favor of quality. I would tread very lightly if I were in Google's shoes.
- magicalist 13y ago
  Good luck defining "fairness". That regulation is going to go really well.
  - Finster 13y ago
    The Federal Government never let a little thing like undefinability stop them before.
  - damoncali 13y ago
    I hate the word myself as it means little outside of sports. However, there is a very real perception of "fairness", and often the status quo defines that perception. Whatever changes Google makes will be interpreted as unfair by someone, and given their dominant status - that could be a problem if enough people get nervous.

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dbla 13y ago

Why does google need to penalize sites for spammy inbound links? Couldn't they instead just make those links not contribute at all (not penalize the ranking but not boost it at all either)? I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but I'm curious.

rubinelli 13y ago
Simply ignoring spammy links doesn't reduce link spam, because people still have an incentive to keep spamming in the off chance that some of those links will be considered valid.

eddywebs 13y ago

The article is inaccurate read between the lines of the comments.

ScottWhigham 13y ago

Somewhat of a sidebar, but what's to prevent the following: 1) You buy 1000 links for $5 [1] 2) You enjoy a brief rise in the rankings 3) Google catches on and penalizes you 4) You use the link disavow tool to effectively say, "We didn't do it! A competitor did it to us!" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5813496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5813496

sharkweek 13y ago
We're seeing a lot of this tactic in a lot of the more... difficult industries right now with super high value terms (payday loans, viagra, etc). What is hot and popular is doing exactly 1-3 except on a hyper-rotation of domains. Build up a bunch of shitty websites, get them ranking for a few weeks, they inevitably get penalized, then just switch domains and rinse and repeat.
davedx 13y ago
Why would you enjoy a brief rise in the rankings from something that causes 'negative SEO'? Surely these inbound links either harm or help you, not both?
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  Inbound links don't immediately get detected as negative. That takes a while.

slig 13y ago

In the Google Webmaster's tools it's possible to download a list of all the new links that are linking to your site. Using this tool I've been able to discover that someone has started to buy spammy links in wordpress comments linking to my website. Those wordpress blogs are full of spam, so I want to believe that Google is already ignoring everything there.

trevin 13y ago

The most frustrating part of negative SEO or any link cleanup is that Google doesn't tell which links they think are spammy links. If you are working for/with a site that has been online for a while, they will have thousands of crappy looking links pointing to their site. Scraper sites pick up content from other websites all the time and cross post with porn and other crap. Directory submissions that were perfectly fine 5 or 10 years ago can now be viewed as "low quality" by Google. Blogs that used to be well-maintained have been bought by spammers and SEOs and are now content farms. Google's lack of transparency when it comes to links is very troublesome. I understand they can't give out the ins and outs of their algo, but asking your average website owner to go through 10k+ backlinks and identify and remove the links is a pretty tall task when there isn't a clear standard on what is bad and what isn't.

carl689 13y ago

The article has some user comments I found relevant I don't see pointed out here. "That change was actually made a year ago. The only change on that page is the positioning of the video. The actual text has not changed in over a year."-Barry Schwartz AND "The article is also incredibly wrong about the previous change. Google did't add the "almost" last year (2012) but TEN years ago, in 2003, as you can see with Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20030915000000*/http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html http://web.archive.org/web/20030915000000*/http://www.google... -LowLevel

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

The amazing thing is that this is news. Of course competitors can trash your organic rankings -- and it's a lot easier for them to trash you than it is to promote themselves. I'm glad Google is slowly coming around to admitting that this house of mirrors has some flaws. The more information publishers get about this, the better choices we can make in content selection.

alan_cx 13y ago
A confirmation of fact is less relevant than peoples assumptions? What you seem to be suggesting is that information that people cannot be 100% sure of is perfectly valid, and reasonable to base decisions on. But, when that information is confirmed to be true, that has not enough value to report. I simply do not understand or accept that way of thinking.
btilly 13y ago
What is news here is not that negative SEO exists. It is that Google has been forced to admit that it is a real issue. Edit: After reading the comments at the end of the story, magicalist is right. The story is wrong, Google made this change a lot longer than a week ago, it isn't actually news.
- magicalist 13y ago
  ...10 years ago.
  - btilly 13y ago
    No, last week. So it really is news. That's when their help page went from saying, "There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." to "Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." In other words from saying, "Don't worry about it" to "We're on it".
    - magicalist 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

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hippich 13y ago

I believe true way of dealing with spam links for Google would be ignore these. It will solve several problems at once: prevent spammed websites getting into index, prevent legitimate websites getting banned because of negative seo, make "seo specialist" job become a joke, and people eventually give up paying for it. Google on the other hand tries to punish, i.e. to scare away potential gamers, instead of ignoring these. I believe this is wrong and inefficient approach.

damon_c 13y ago

It would be interesting if Google let us optionally search using the original pure pagerank search from 10 years ago. Would it be like turning off spam filtering on email?

jonknee 13y ago

Negative SEO and negative click fraud (a competitor clicking on my AdSense ads fraudulently) are the two biggest things that keep me up at night. It's terrifying knowing that something so simple can take me out overnight and there's nothing I can do to prevent it. I'm surprised this hasn't become more like DDOS where thugs blackmail webmasters into submission with the threat of taking them offline. Or maybe it has and I just haven't heard...

btilly 13y ago

Weird evil conspiracy idea. The more people use negative SEO and their victims use Google's tools to disavow it, the worse Bing's results get.

ywang0414 13y ago

Any system can be cheated. Nothing here.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

I think the more scary thing here is it's incredibly easy and dirt cheap to completely bury your competitors with bad SEO. Think of a multi-million dollar company wanting to dispose of smaller competitors. For even a modest outlay of say $1000, you could do incredible, long-term damage to other companies web sites. Also, I'm pretty sure Google has no plans to update their algorithm to account for this huge flaw either, making every company vulnerable to attack from anybody.

programminggeek 13y ago

Here is probably the best thing I can sy about dealing with SEO... you should care a little, but you should really stop caring a lot. What I mean is, you should totally care about SEO, and doing basic, simple things like targeting long tail traffic, some simple content syndication/distribution/guest posting, but mostly I've seen that the best results are the outcome of an ongoing process, not the fad of the day. Creating content, being smart about it, but ignoring the day to day ebbs and flows of the SEO world will make you a much happier person because in most cases, your competition isn't doing anything at all, so putting any effort in at all is almost a win by default.

adventured 13y ago

The solution here is dead simple. Shitty links should have no SEO value, rather than a negative value. That eliminates the problem of people using bad links to hurt their competition.

JangoSteve 13y ago
But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain. Which would probably make the practice much more widespread.
- adventured 13y ago
  Initially it would. If Google is any good at scoring links webmasters would quickly figure out the non-benefit and would stop. And Google could feel free to be overly harsh in making links neutral in value. Better to miss to the middle, than to miss to the negative and punish good sites being bombed with spam links by competitors. Aka first do no harm.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain. Well, nothing to lose except money: to discourage this, you just have to have links-of-unknown-quality produce no benefit, and links-with-positive-quality provide positive value; this is better than links of unknown value providing positive value and links with negative quality providing negative value.

macspoofing 13y ago

Is it me, or has HN been invaded by SEO consultants (case in point: OP). There's quite a bit more SEO-related topics these days. It seems to have started a few months ago, and it's getting worse.

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kbojody 13y ago

Currently the linked Article redirects to a removed page. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2272092/Page-Removed http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2272092/Page-Removed Here is a cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2272092/Google-Confirms-Negative-SEO-Exists http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

rainhacker 13y ago

"This page has been removed due to inaccuracies. We regret the error."

jrochkind1 13y ago

"This page has been removed due to inaccuracies. We regret the error." hmm?

ekanes 13y ago

One way Google could mitigate this would be if webmasters could tell Google about new/expected links. Obviously some links are unexpected (great!) but if Google new you weren't trying to add 50 links, and 50 links showed up, perhaps they could take that into account.

dragonwriter 13y ago

Seems to me the general solution to negative SEO is instead of an unknown-quality-link bonus and a bad-link penalty, unknown-quality links should have no value and good links should have positive value. The problem is it is probably harder to split the world into probably-good vs. unknown links rather than probably-bad vs. unknown links.

kushti 13y ago

Hey, Google, what's about "Don't be evil" populism ?

csomar 13y ago

Wait a second, why doesn't Google just count the link juice of these links are 0 (null). This doesn't benefit the spammer, and it doesn't kill the innocent. Am I missing something here?

Matt_Cutts 13y ago

Note: this article is over a year old. The article makes it sound as if this is some new pronouncement, but it's really not. I've been using the language mentioned in this article since 2010, at least: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/#comment-485916 http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/... where I said "we’ve said in the past that we work very hard to prevent competitor A from hurting competitor B." The change on the official guidelines comes from a tech writer noticing that I normally say "we work hard to prevent this" and asking back in February 2012 if we should update the language on that page. I said yes and the language changed in March 2012. It looks like this article is from April 2012. One of the big reasons we say softer things (rather than "it's impossible") regarding the idea of negative SEO is that we have seen people to pretty crazy things to steal/hijack domain names in the past, like the bizarre history of sex.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com People talk about negative SEO far more than people actually attempt it, because you're never quite sure what effect (say) pointing some links to a site might have--it might help the site instead of hurting it--plus it's typically a better use of your time to develop your own site. But if there's a site that is worried about negative SEO, the site can disavow any links they want using our the disavow tool in Google's Webmaster Tools. You can even sort to see the most recent links if you're worried that this is something that just started. The primary usage of the disavow tool is so that a site can disavow bad linking that the site did itself and can't get removed from the web, but the disavow tool also works fine to disavow links that you're worried might be spammy.

Caligula 13y ago
It just seems like such a bizarre game we are required to play. I am picturing you jeering at us to "dance monkey dance".
lingben 13y ago
Matt, no amount of hand-waving will convince people when there is ample evidence of negative SEO, including meticulous case studies published online. As well, the very fact that Google has given in and introduced the disavow tool, it is incontrovertible proof that negative SEO is effective. Google had a good run but you have not been able to keep up with those who have striven day and night to beat your algos. The question is, can google play catch up? and do so in time? Several billions of dollars are riding on that question.

scottgerri 13y ago

Nowadays, Social bookmarking and Directory submission are important and great way to get traffic and all source..

Levigneron 13y ago

Bonjour Je viens de recevoir après avoir demandé un réexamen de mon site (maison-eco-malin . c o m) une réponse de Google, que mon site n’est toujours pas conforme ! Identifiant du message : [WMT-81011] J’ai envoyé un fichier pour désavouer un grand nombre de liens non désirés Mais rien ne change ! Je me retrouve avec des liens de sites bizarres sans rapport avec mon site. Comme des liens de sites sexuelle voir porno, de testes de sites, ect… Savez-vous comment arrêter cela ? Comment empêcher de faire de mauvais liens vers mon site ? Comment expliquer à Google que j’y suis pour rien ? Bonne journée Cordialement E.Levigneron