Explain To Me How Negative SEO ISNT Real?
-
I'm seeing lots of "offers" springing up to do negative SEO on your competitors. I know people keep insisting this sort of thing is just a bogeyman, but follow my logic here:
- We know the Penguin update PENALIZED, and not just devalued "over optimization." Read: exact match keyword links.
- We know that if your link profile is too "unnaturally" keyword heavy, (it should be majority your brand or your domain or your company name, etc) you get penalized. Again, not devalued, PENALIZED.
Ok. So what is to stop a blackhatter from using one of those software bots to just kill a competitor? Knowing the above two points, lets say a website is ranking for "cool widgets". Why not just create a bunch of exact match keyword spam links for "cool widgets" targeting that website. In a while, the Penguin penalty kicks in and bammo.
The thing that scares me about the post Penguin landscape is that google has specifically named an activity ("over optimization") that will get you PENALIZED. So, don't do that, right? Except, that means they've explicitly outlined an activity that will be penalized, and is easy for others to do to you, and that you would be powerless to prevent.
I await the usual "this is an age old worry that has never come true" replies. But if you reply that way, ask yourself, can you refute the logic of the points above? And also... oh no... It's happening. I'm seeing it.
-
This has happened to my site - 80 000 (that's about 97% of our total links) + forum account and blog comment spam with exact match text links. Over 4000 domains. It's simply not possible to get these links removed. Most are abandoned blogs or forums that only spammers use. Alot of them are also non english language sites.
I did attempt to make contact with the webmasters of about 100 of these sites, and only got one response.
Also as it's not a manual penalty, but an algorithmic penalty google say nothing can be done.
The good news is many of the blogs have realized they have a security flaw allowing spam bots to create accounts and post comments and have subsequently deleted all spam comments or even shut the blogs down entirely.
The negative SEO campaign continues though - new links are still being added. I have seen some of my competitors targeted on the same forums / blogs too, a pretty clear sign it's a negative SEO attack.
How would one go about discovering the source of the attacks?
-
Lol. That's funny.
-
Yes negative SEO is real but there are many tools that you can use to check out the links that are directed to you. The best free tools are Bing Webmaster and Google Webmaster. You can see if you have links that are spam related and create a report detailing that you are a victim of negative seo and that you would like those links to not count against you.
You should also contact the web masters of those sites and inform them nicely at first that you would like to have those links removed and if that doesn't work inform them that you will contact google that they are in fact complicit in the negative seo campaign against you.
I hope this helps.
-
Hey. Good luck with that. PPC no longer converts, and it's filled with scammers who got 10/10 quality scores to sit all day long at the top of keywords.
-
Hi Brian this is exactly what i was discussing with my boss the other day. We could ( but we wont ) target a competitor and point a tonne of naff links to a site and theoretically sink them.
My understanding is the penguin update is a joke in that they've not protected against using it as a counter strike tactic.
I just dont get it
Or maybe they just want organic SEO to sink so we all give up and throw cash at PPC...
-
It's real, has been for longer than many people realize IMO.
If it's done sloppily then it can be easy for the victim to demonstrate to Google that they weren't responsible. Sadly, it's easy for the perpetrator to make it look like it was done by the site owner.
I sleep knowing that if my domain doesn't have a history of sloppy spam and hard-core anchor text optimization, it's easy for me to point to the start date of any negative SEO campaign as post-Penguin. That's pretty good evidence that you didn't just suddenly start building shady links to your domain.
If you already were building shady links and someone else just sent more in your direction, there's not much to say other than that sucks, and you're going to have to spend a hell of a lot of time contacting webmasters to remove links and documenting your process.
-
Oh, believe me, I don't want to do it! No way! What I'm saying is, I fear it. And I'm tired of hearing "experts" say it's some sort of thing that is possible but not likely because google would never let it happen. They let it happen with Penguin. I'm seeing it.
-
Brian-
Negative SEO does work. It is real.....you can do it. I can give you a number of examples where we have had clients come to us because they have had competitors do negative seo and they have been hurt by it....temporarily.
So where does that leave you? There are always going to be ways to beat the system. Even today you could back over your neighbors mailbox and drive away and not get caught. You still have to ask yourself is that what you want to be doing with your time and energy. Just like everything else, the search engines will eventually figure out how to identify when it has happened and the strategy will go away.
Without giving too much detail, I will also tell you that on several of our new clients that had a negative seo issue related to their competitors hammering them, we were able to identify who was doing the negative seo and we ended up passing their information along to google and others. It was not pretty for them.....
Good luck. Please show me the thumbs up.
Mark
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Inbound links to internal search with pharma spam anchor text. Negative seo attack
Suddenly in October I had a spike on inbound links from forums and spams sites. Each one had setup hundreds of links. The links goes to WordPress internal search. Example: mysite.com/es/?s=⚄
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Arlinaite470 -
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Old subdomains - what to do SEO-wise?
Hello, I wanted the community's advice on how to handle old subdomains. We have https://www.yoursite.org. We also have two subdomains directly related to the main website: https://www.archive.yoursite.org and https://www.blog.yoursite.org. As these pages are not actively updated, they are triggering lots and lots of errors in the site crawl (missing meta descriptions, and much much more). We do not have particular intentions of keeping them up-to-date in terms of SEO. What do you guys think is the best option of handling these? I considered de-indexing, but content of these page is still relevant and may be useful - yet it is not up to date and it will never be anymore. Many thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | e.wel0 -
Opinion on Gotch SEO methods & services
I would love to get you all's take on Gotch SEO. I am gearing up to link build for a site in the next several months, and have been reading up from sources other than Moz, in preparation. (Need to re-read Moz's guide, too, but I have already read it last year) I'm reading Gotch SEO's main link building method articles right now, and am wondering what you all think. Do you think they have a good approach and are generally reliable? Likewise, has anyone used their service for getting a link? What was your experience? Or if you haven't used the service, any quick takes on it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scienceisrad0 -
PDF Sharing sites - scribd/dropbox/edocr/etc Cleaning Up SEO History
Howdy, Whilst in the process of cleaning up a new clients seo profile and have encountered a lot of techniques I am uncomfortable with and in my opinion should be removed. One technique I have not seen before is using a load of pdf sharing and video sites. The domains have high DA ratings, but to me the intention is highly questionable. The sites include: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tuxb8w1qowcm27i/Looking for boiler spares-geniune parts and consumables.pdf?dl=0 http://www.scribd.com/doc/241542076/Looking-for-Boiler-Spares-geniune-Parts-and-Consumables http://www.divshare.com/download/26207602-569 And so the list goes on for about 50 domains. Am I correct to be concerned here and what was the seo plan here? Thanks in advance. Andy Southall. (Marz Ventures)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
Active Rain and SEO
I have been an active rain member for a long time. When I check my web site I can not find any links from Active Rain. I just updated my Active Rain profile and upgraded to their paid subscription. Can you tell me if this blog is creating a follow link back to my web site at www.RealEstatemarketLeaders.com the blog on active rain is here. at http://activerain.trulia.com/blogsview/4529309/hud-homes-for-sale-in-tri-cities-wa
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Brandon_Patton0 -
What means a back door link. Please explain and I will give you credit
Some one is asking me to do a back door link to each other, what dose it mean?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Vendor Descriptions for SEO... Troublesome?
Howdy! I have been tossing this idea around in my head over the weekend and I cannot decide which answer is correct, so here I am! We a retailer of products and is currently in the midst of redesigning our site-- not only design but also content. The issue that we are facing is with product descriptions from our vendors. We are able to access the product descriptions/specs from their websites and use them on ours, but my worry is that we will get tagged for duplicate content. Other retailers (as well as the vendors) are using this content as well, so I don't want this to have an adverse effect on our ranking. There are so many products that it would be a large feat to re-write unique content-- not to mention that the majority of the rhetoric would be extremely similar. What have you seen in your experiences in similar situations? Is it bad to use the descriptions? Or do we need to bite the bullet and do our best to re-write hundreds of product descriptions? Or is there a way to use the descriptions and tag it in a way that won't have Google penalize us? I originally thought that if we have enough other unique content on our site, that it shouldn't be as big of a deal, but then I realized how much of our site's structure is our actual products. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jpretz0