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Hi Dr. Meyers,

Thanks again for the thoughtful answers.

I wanted to share our final findings about this matter with the rest of the community.  It turns out that our client did face a pretty brutal N-SEO attack.  They were targeted with over 300 bad links (and still counting) in a period of 3.5 months. The links were targeted at sections of the brand name in an effort to confuse Google, and cause damage to brand name in search results.  As a result several pages of the website are still gone from the search results (in relation to brand name searches).  And this causes a fake ROR report to continue showing at the top of the search results when you search for our client's brand name (and someone also has built positive links to this ROR report).

The final question to be answered was this:  what should be done about it?  Dr. Meyers was right that this is not a war that our client could win.  The only thing the client could try was to "build up the positive link profile to counter the bad links." Unfortunately, our client does not believe in chasing Google's algo changes around.  Therefore they won't spend money on link building strategies (and I don't disagree with this).

During this process I learned a lot about N-SEO and the various types of people involved in it.  And it is not "very rare" like Google or the "just keep creating quality content" crowd want everyone to believe.  Here is very good (and I believe well researched) article about what is actually going on: web master world. com/ google/4677866. htm  And while we did not experience this N-SEO technique, here was a very good article on link injection: site olytics. com / black-hat-seo-technique-demystified/

Bottom line:  your average local small plumbing business, tire store, landscape company, etc., can be easily decimated in the search rankings in 2-4 weeks. And do most small companies like that have the resources to pay someone to start building positive link profiles to try and counter the attack?  The answer for most small businesses is No.

Our client seems to think that the only way to really counter this garbage is force Google to do the right thing, via legislation. By the "right thing" he means this:  giving all companies on the Internet a "Bill of Rights" for their virtual storefront.  One of the Rights should be that the small business can determine what geography can be allowed to impact their search results.  99% of small businesses in the United States don't sell anything internationally.  Why should they then be penalized because someone posts garbage links on penalized servers in Europe, China, Mexico, etc.?  If they set their Webmaster Tools geo-target to "Illinois" or the "United States" then only links from servers in those areas should be allowed to affect their rankings (positive or negative).  Furthermore, if someone does find a way to institute a N-SEO attack from within the United States against your brand you would then have legal recourse to immediately do something about it.  It would not even require most small businesses to file a TRO/lawsuit/injunction. Most of it could be handled directly with the handful of U.S. hosting companies.  Would this idea stop all N-Seo attacks?  Of course not. But the situation would at least be manageable in your own country.  Furthermore, I think it would take the wind out of the sails of many N-SEO people if much of their cheap foreign labor was rendered useless (as U.S. hosting companies could be required to block foreign IPs that are caught posting garbage more than 1 time).  I think the reason a lot of people employee N-SEO people now is because it is easy, and they can't get caught. Make it more difficult and only the hardened criminals are going to continue with it.

Our client has no resolution, but hopefully something in here helps a small business out there.

Jake

Hi Ryan,

It appears to me that Dr. Meyers just confirmed this is a N-SEO attack.

Hopefully he or someone else can help us find a tool to quickly find these new bad/spammy links before GWT's find them.  If we can remove them almost as fast as they go up, hopefully the person running this attack will lose interest and move on to easier prey.

Jake

Dr. Meyers,

Thank you for the response.

You seem to have pointed out several things which actually make my argument stronger.  As stated in our first post, we are not an SEO company and our client does not perform SEO on their own (they have no marketing employees working for them directly). Therefore, if you are stating that their are a bunch of "bad/spammy 301 redirects" and "bad free directory links" coming to the website then you just confirmed that it was in fact done as part of a negative SEO campaign.  This is what I have been trying to point out all along.

In regards to their being a bunch of "thin content on the website," this is correct.  However, it has nothing to do with this timeline or the specific problem we are trying to solve.  On January 7th the client asked us to add a massive amount of new local market pages to the website. The pages have nothing to do with SEO, they are totally for user benefit (and they are working as PPC conversion rates have gone up 60% since the partial addition).  And as this massive page project was transpiring it did create some thin/duplicate content.  Does it have even 1% to do with the problem that transpired in early December?  Nope.  Forget my opinion, based on hard-facts it is not possible.

I know sometimes it is easy for smart people (and I mean this as a compliment) to get off track and point out "holes everywhere they see them."  This truck has rust in spots, a tail-light out, a crack in the windshield, some stains in the carpet, the rear-end housing drips grease, and the engine idles rough.. But we took it in to the mechanic shop because on a specific date the transmission started slipping.  And at this point in time our client has ordered us to specifically find out why the transmission started slipping in early December.  We are aware of all the other small problems with the car before we took it into the shop.  But the client is only paying us to work on one specific problem.  The facts (timeline) show that the client towed a 20,000 pound trailer behind this truck the first week in December. Yet the truck is only rated to tow 7,000 pounds.  So we are going to focus on what we were told to fix, and what the facts point to.

All this being said, this company received a hoax ROR report in early December. They were contacted (and still are) by Internet Mafia companies. They have numerous bad links and 301 redirects pointing to the website, which they nor we created (many of them appear to be years old though) They continue to get brand new spam links pointed to specific pages on this website every week (many are coming from down servers in Europe).  All of these things have caused specific pages on this website to be suppressed.  This is what I would like to stay laser focused on, and try to resolve. Sure can we issue a "disallow file" for a bunch of the spam/crappy links?  Yes.  But that won't fix the problem with the new links being added every week which we can't find until months after they have been added, and have already caused ranking damage.

We need to find a solution to locate these new spam links as soon as they get posted, but before Google penalizes the website for them.  While we love MOZ, it is not the tool for this (as it might never find bad/spammy links, let alone in 1-2 days).  We are hoping that someone in the MOZ community knows of a tool we can use to help our client find and eradicate these new links as they are going up.  My guess is that once they do we will see these missing pages start to reappear.

Thanks

Jake

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the thoughts.

We agree that organic Google Badge has little to do with what happened.  It was just another interesting data point, which I did not expect to find.  As far as the search results you are getting, that is bizarre.  We and the client have been conducting searches every day, all across the U.S.  And in no screenshots we have been sent the last 6 weeks has anyone found the page you are talking about (but nobody has reported about the organic Google badge as I just noticed it today).

As far as these rash of bad links that are coming in since December, you can only disavow them once you find them. And by the time you find them they usually have already done some damage.  So if someone is working on a shrewd N-SEO campaign, they are going to continue building them via the follow the "slow and steady" build model. (which I read about on a Black Hat forum). And since this client has been coincidentally been called by 2 different Internet Mafia companies, we have to follow the smoke.

Thanks again for all your thoughts.  I truly appreciate it.  We will update the community if/when we figure out exactly what happened.

Good luck with your business in 2015.

Jake

Dirk,

With all due respect, it is a little presumptuous for you to assume we did non't know any of the things you lectured us on the first time.  For you to do it a second time was really unnesssary.

Our client made a conscience decision to install this type of website.  They knew all of the potential pitfallls beforehand, and this is what they wanted.  And personally I think they made a good decision.  They are in the traditional media world and it paid for them to be different. The site works good for them, and they get a lot of compliments for it.  They also get some people who don't like it, but who cares (mainly mobile users; but mobile users are bad leads for their business segment).

We remain committed to helping them find out what is going on.  Within 5 days of the original ROR hoax report being filed they were contacted aggressively by 2 different Internet Mafia companies (Reputation Management).  If you combine the timeline of events with the various drop in rankings there was to much smoke in the direct area not to attribute the smoke to the fire which happened in the same area.

Their site has lots of things that can be improved (like most business operations), and if the client gives us the budget to do it, we will.  But until then we are going to focus on the smoke and fire that happened in the same time and place.

Jake

Community:

I also found another interesting data point today:  when you Google Search the company brand name now, the big organic "Google badge" no longer shows up on the right side of the page (and I verified with several different U.S. IPs). But when you search like this "Brand Name LLC" the organic Google badge shows up.  This is also a fairly new phenomenon (last time I checked it was around Thanksgiving).  And it is very unfortunate as only 5% of consumers include "LLC" when searching for the company name.

Something changed drastically in December.  What caused it? The awesome, big press release (optimizing the brand name in the far left of the Press Release headline).  The optimized ROR hoax report.  Fake bad root-domains from Europe (coming slowly but surely).  I feel like this ugly beast is going to show her face soon  (hopefully I won't go blind)  

Ryan & Dirk,

Why appreciate the thought, it is way off base for the specific topic.  And I would not normally challenge an opinion (when someone is trying to help) but I would hate for users who see this post in the future to thinks "Flash is bad," "Flash can be blamed for almost any ranking problem."

The client is not using some "old" website that they/we just  lazily neglected.  It is newer Moto-CMS technology which we chose to replace their Wordpress template with, in Dec. 2013.  We use flash websites all over the world (not talking about this client) and have no problem getting them ranked (and maintaining ranking) for brand names with Baidu, Yandex, Google & Bing.  Is it as easy to do as with a normal HTML website?  No.  But, if you do things like everyone else does in life, you can only expect to have the same level of success/failure as the sheep you followed.  If you know what you are doing Flash ranks fine, and can provide a better user experience for many users.

Ryan's initial point about "Clear Channel communication's rankings" makes some sense.  And we have observed this with other properties, to a much lesser degree.  However, the timeline of the ROR hoax report, these bad European root domain links that showed up (we have since now found 20, and growing), along with the fact that if you search for "Brand Name Contact Us" their Contact Us page is nowhere to be found (which does not occur in the Clear Channel  comparison), cannot just be blamed on coincidence when all started happening within 8 days of each other.

I truly hope that we can find out exactly what is going on; not just for our client, but, because I want to be able to lay the blue-print out here for the rest of the MOZ community.  As maybe it will help other small businesses from having to go though the same thing.

Jake

Hi Ryan,

Thanks a bunch for reading the post.  Here are your answers:

#1 No manual actions in Webmaster Tools

#2  Index status - went from 260 pages at the beginning of Dec. to 280 pages by Jan. 4th.

#3  Crawl status - on Dec. 24th average pages crawled per day went from 67 to 225. Then it has spiked from 85-115 since then.

#4  Kilobytes per day - on Dec. 24th it went from 2500 to 4800.  Two days later it went back to the normal average.

#5  Time spent downloading - on Dec. 18th this had a crazy spike from 320 average to 878. But it went back to the normal average the next day (nothing odd showing for Dec. 24th).

#6  Keyword searches-rankings - the brand name still shows to rank #1 on MOZ and in Webmaster Tools. CTR also stayed the same for the brand name.  For non-branded search terms, they don't really rank for very many.  Maybe they rank for 10 phrases in the Top 10. But there appears to be no changes in the ranking or CTR for those terms during this period in question.  This company has always generated new leads via PPC and Direct mail.

Again, the main thing is that most internal pages from the website have totally disappeared when the brand name is searched. And now when people Google the brand name (which is what potential clients do before they sign the contract, not when the initially find the company via PPC) they find almost no information on the company, a bunch of junk blogs (that don't belong to the company) and this terrible fake Rip-Off report post (which was clearly optimized).

Do the best of the best Black Hat people (like people who own Internet Mafia companies) have the ability to poison pages of your website so they stop showing up in any search results?  Because when you used to do a Bing/Google search for "Brand Name Co. Reviews" their Customer Reviews page showed up #1 (even above the Home page).  Once all of this happened if you did a search for that exact phrase the Customer Reviews page is gone (not in the Top 100).  And the Rip Off report post shows up #1.  Then if you do simply a "Brand Name Co." search only 3 internal pages still exist.

Jake

Jake

Hello to the Moz Community,

Let me start by saying, we are not an SEO company.  We are the in-house agency for our parent corp, and the 7 companies in their portfolio.  We manage their PPC and other digital items.  None of the companies use an SEO company.  Their "SEO strategy" is to not have one.  They internally post on their own Social Media account, their own Blog, and send out their own Press Releases (which we help write the copy sometimes).

One of the accounts encountered a very bizarre, and serious ranking problem around Dec 25th-30th. In the past when you Googled the company's brand name you would get 5-6 pages of internal content show up at the very Top of the results.  Pages like Home Page, Blog Home, Contact Us, About Us, Client Reviews Page, etc. (core pages). There were then several other non core pages that would show up in the Top 20 results (my recollection is they controlled about 12-14 of the Top 20 results for the brand name). Unfortunately, around Dec. 25th this all cratered.  And the only internal page that would display when you Googled the brand name was the Home Page (totally gone; even checking 100 rankings deep).  So the question we have spend weeks trying to figure out is, what in the heck happened?

We got together with the company to find out any and all possible changes or things could of happened since the first of December, which could have contributed to this cratering.  Here is what we found:

#1  The company made an acquisition of a smaller competitor in 2014.  Around Dec. 10th they sent out a great press release announcing the acquisition.  Since the press release was involving someone in the TV/radio advertising agency industry it was very popular (the best release they ever put out). The release was picked up by over 100 high page rank local TV stations, all across the U.S. (along with the normal companies that pick up online releases). The headline of the release was "Brand Name Reviews Assets of TV Ad Agency Competitor."  Most of the stations that picked it up placed "Do not follow" links, but it was still an amazingly successful release.

#2  Around Dec. 15th this 8 year old company received their first negative "client review."  The review was not from a real client though, it was posted on Rip-Off report by a fake client, the Internet Mafia (reputation management co.) or a former employee/contractor.  The posting was deliberately optimized.  The URL and the Title Tag contained all sort of words like "Reviews" "Complaints" the "Domain Name," and the Company Brand Name (whoever did it, knew what they were doing).

#3  Towards the end of December and into January the company received 6-8 bizarre root domain links.  The links show to of come from domains that were just registered in November/December.  Yet the domain name was already voluntarily forfeited by the beginning of January.  Google Webmaster Tools is still showing the links, but when you go to the domain "all it shows is "cannot be found."  WHOIS has screenshots of all of them though.  Here is one:  http://www.domaintools.com/research/screenshot-history/lizardeyephoto.com/  The domains themselves had nothing to do with the type of business this client account operates in, but the information after the / contained partial pieces of the company brand name.  Here is an example: http://www.martygraveyard.com/buying-inexpensive-vehicles-at-on-line-community-automobile-auctions/  I personally don't think 6-8 new root domains could crater a website with 290 root domains (and 1500 links), but maybe those domains/sites are somehow "cloaked;" and they are actually showing bad information to the bots/spiders, but us humans can't see it?  I honestly am not educated enough on the subject to know...

#4  In mid January, three of the brand name pages returned:  Home Page, About Us, Blog Home.  However, the other pages are nowhere to be found.  The companies Contact Us page, Client Reviews page (which used to rank 2nd), and all of the other Top 20 pages are totally gone.  They are still indexed if you do a "site:brandname.com" search, but they won't show up when you Google the brand name.

#5  Search results are almost identical with Bing and Google.

So, here is the million dollar question:  was our client's Brand Name deliberately attacked via an N-SEO Black Hat attack, in an effort to get it their internal pages to drop out of the rankings?  Or did Google and Bing incorrectly issue some sort of partial penalty on certain pages due to the amazing success (and them believing it was some sort of link buying scheme) of the Press Release that was sent out at the beginning of December?

If you read to the bottom of this, I am grateful for you doing so.  Thanks in advance for anyone who tries to help us and our in-house client.

Jake