Looking for recent bad SEO / black hat example such as JC Penney example from 2011
-
I am giving a presentation in a few weeks and looking for a "what not to do" larger brand example that made poor SEO choices to try and game Google with black hat tactics. Any examples you can point me to?
-
An article we wrote a while ago with a few examples. It's my site but answers your question:
http://buildforsearch.com/googles-worst-penalties-and-what-happened/
-
Overstock offering discounts for edu links: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067445/The-Difference-Between-Black-Hat-SEO-and-Bad-SEO.
**From Article: "**Just this week, Overstock was penalized for extending discounts of up to 10 percent to universities/students/faculty who wrote posts that "happen to contain keywords in the anchor text of links." Not only is this against Google's guidelines, but it's also against the Federal Trade Commission's Guidelines; this link will take you to an article regarding a company which is helping with FTC disclosure issues."
-
You might like to take a look at this: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/27/interflora-disappears-from-google / http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-back-150366
-
It is not one company, but there is always the payday loan update where google targeted a whole industries. http://searchengineland.com/google-pay-day-loan-algorithm-google-search-algorithm-update-to-target-spammy-queries-162941
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
-
Linking Websites/ Plagiarized Content Ranking Above Original Content
Hey friends! Sooo this article was originally published in December 2016: https://www.realwealthnetwork.com/learn/best-places-to-buy-rental-property-2017/ It has been consistently ranking in positions 2-3 for long tail keyword "best places to buy rental property 2017" (and related keywords) since January-ish. It's been getting about 2000-2,500 unique views per week, until last week when it completely dropped off the internet (it's now ranking 51+). We just did a site redesign and changed some URL structures, but I created a redirect, so I don't understand why that would affect our ranking so much. Plus all of our other top pages have held their rankings -- in fact, our top organic article actually moved up from position 3 to 2 for much more competitive keywords (1031 exchange). What's even weirder is when I copy the sections of my article & paste into Google with quotes, our websites doesn't show up anywhere. Other websites that have plagiarized my article (some have included links back to the article, and some haven't) are ranking, but mine is nowhere to be found. Here are some examples: https://www.dawgsinc.com/rental-property-the-best-places-to-buy-in-the-year-2017/ http://b2blabs.com/2017/08/rental-property-the-best-places-to-buy-in-the-year-2017/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-places-buy-rental-property-year-2017-missy-lawwill/?trk=mp-reader-card http://news.sys-con.com/node/4136506 Is it possible that Google thinks my article is newer than the copycat articles, because of the new URL, and now I'm being flagged as spam? Does it think these are spam websites we've created to link back to our own content? Also, clearly my article is higher quality than the ranking articles. Why are they showing up? I double checked the redirect. It's good. The page is indexed... Ahhh what is going on?! Thanks for your help in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jessica7110 -
Footer images links, good or bad?
Hi everybody! I have a very serius question because i have a problem with this. We run a website of voucher codes and we are looking that our rivals are putting their logos on footers of online stores with images, sometimes link to home, sometimes link to store within webpage. Should i ask for the same to online stores? I have scary to get a penalty by Google. Please help me with this and recommend me something because we are doing fair play but rivals are doing this and they get best results in SERPS. Thanks very much! Best regards!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pompero990 -
Can anyone explain some below SEO questions ?
Can we do link building like directory, article, press releases, classifieds, business listing, social bookmarking etc. We need to check DA, Alexa, Page Rank, cBlock IP before publishing any kind of Link but how much Max or Min. no. should be for consider any website like DA should be min 20-30-40 etc.. How can consider a natural links? Which type anchor text should be in any kind of links may be directory etc. In website interlinking we should put Exact Links or no need to put any links For.ex.my website is abc.com.au then we can put link for Website Design keywords or Should be long tail keyword. How can we do content marketing means we should post blog in internal website or need to create External Blog like BlogSpot, WordPress. In blog we should put any keyword link OR should be post without links. We can put link on no follow website. Why more website coming on Google first page but they are doing Spammy links like exact keywords links, unnatural links etc.. Thanks, Akhilesh
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
301 redirect a set of pages to one landing page/URL?
I'm planning to redirect the following pages to one new URL/landing page: Old URLs: http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/1 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/2 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/3 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/4 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/5 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/6 New URL: http://www.newdomain.com/new-folder/new-page Code in .htaccess that I will be using: RedirectMatch 301 /folder/page/(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/new-folder/new-page Let me know if this is correct. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
SEO Hosting and many dummy blog, is it still works ?
Hi, I want to keep update with the latest trend of SEO,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theconversion
in one side, we know that google now more focus on-page rather than off-page,
the Question is, when we handle a big size of company, that we can't change easily,
the content inside the web, this will become a problem. do you have any suggestion about
this matters ? Second question, I still keep my SEO team to do this, 5 people, 1 people hold 7 .com website,
that hosted all in SEO hosting with different IP Class C, and 7 social network site. Everytime they
are posting a unique article and put link that targetting the money site. My Question is, is it still
work to do all of this ? so at the end of month, we have almost 70links that going to money site,
with composition of link, 50% exact match text, 30 partial match text, and 20% direct www. link today, it is still working, all the site that we optimize, going up to page 1. But I want to know about
the future, or at least in your country that more competitive rather than in my country (Indonesia),
what do you do for backlink that created from your farm. I also heard that, SEO Hosting is not use, the things that works is, when u posting an article, make
sure u post from unique IP address, not from same computer. Please give me enlightment, I truly open for discussion, thanks a lot0 -
Are there *truly* any white-hat link-building tactics?
With our new knowledge -- yielded from J.C. Penney, Forbes, Overstock, content farms, et al -- that the link graph/link profile can be algorithmically mined by search engines to uncover non-natural patterns of links occuring over time, is there any level of link-building that is safe to engage in? If so, then what are those "bright white"-hat tactics that are 100% safe for a site to use?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jcolman0