Negative SEO exists OFFICIAL

[OldWelshGuy]

Matt cutts just admitted at a closed session at SMX that Negative SEO has happened in a number of cases.

People have asked questions about negative SEO for a long time. Our guidelines used to say it’s nearly impossible to do that, but there have been cases where that’s happened, so we changed the wording on that part of our guidelines.

Got that guys? it is REAL. not imaginary as many have claimed, often shouting down those of us who had actually carried it out on our own test sites.

Negative SEO is real, Google are concerned and they are taking urgent action to prevent it.

 

[makeusvisible]

Its not exactly breaking news..... so many people have had webmaster tools warnings in the past few months which directly relate to unnatural link building, its clear that Google have no way of knowing where those links come from (the website owner or a competitor).

I just cant see a way they can combat it.....other than reducing the overall impact of inbound links (positive or negative).

 

[MASSEY]

It's here with us today.

But how long until google start ignoring links again instead of penalising?

I think they implemented it on purpose to get people thinking less about SEO.

 

[Chunkford]

Google are concerned and they are taking urgent action to prevent it.

Yea, and they're thinking about bringing out a tool that they think will fix the problem, and hope people wont abuse it or use it to their advantage

 

[Chunkford]

But how long until google start ignoring links again instead of penalising?

The sooner the better

I think they implemented it on purpose to get people thinking less about SEO.

Conspiracy theories will get you into trouble

 

[MASSEY]

Conspiracy theories will get you into trouble

Well according to another thread OWG has started, it looks as if it going to be with us for a lot longer than we thought.

By the looks of it, it was implimented on purpose. They want website owners to feed them with all the information their robot is not capable of understanding. A 'reporting bad links' facility...

This is no conspiracy. I would put money on me being right

 

[makeusvisible]

Well according to another thread OWG has started, it looks as if it going to be with us for a lot longer than we thought.

By the looks of it, it was implimented on purpose. They want website owners to feed them with all the information their robot is not capable of understanding. A 'reporting bad links' facility...

This is no conspiracy. I would put money on me being right

There is no way (no matter how much money they throw at it) they can know if a link comes form the site owner or a negative source. The mistake Google have made IMO is putting so much weight on backlinks..... its got to go social!

 

[aidan1980]

Its not exactly breaking news..... so many people have had webmaster tools warnings in the past few months which directly relate to unnatural link building, its clear that Google have no way of knowing where those links come from (the website owner or a competitor).

I just cant see a way they can combat it.....other than reducing the overall impact of inbound links (positive or negative).

OWG has on many occassions on here over the years said on here negative seo could be done and people argued against it, seems they were wrong all a long and he was correct. And one tool google are bringing out is you will be able to tell google to totally ignore links that are pointing to you that you don't want

 

[MASSEY]

There is no way (no matter how much money they throw at it) they can know if a link comes form the site owner or a negative source. The mistake Google have made IMO is putting so much weight on backlinks..... its got to go social!

Google were already quite good at devaluing low quality links. Especially profile links from forums.

They also devalued the strength of links from known spammy ways to build links like article directories.

But for some reason now, rather than devalue, they are looking to cause people trouble from the links.

And by creating a facility for reporting bad links, they are gathering more information to make their algo better, causing people to be even more worried about building links, and increasing their ppc revenue...

I think this situation is all designed to get people less reliant on being top of google organic to make money.

It all sits in nicely with the way they alternate the highest positions in serps making it difficult to sit number one ALL the time, not passing search information from people signed into google etc etc.

Social isn't the way, how is that a better way? It's cheaper, meaning even more easy to game than content links.

 

[LianneF]

Just read OWG blog post and agree that they should show us every link in GWT rather than some, especially if they are penalising us for bad links that we can't even find as even using the paid backlink software doesn't show everything. I welcome the feature in GWT to disallow links, just hope they actually do it and don't take months.

 

[Suzuki]

BUT (and this is a big but) they totally must give access to every single link they know about to the webmaster that has verified his site. Otherwise once again we will have been given a brush with no head, and a shovel with no handle, with which to clean up the mess.

I think that would be a given... the system obviously wouldn't work at all if they don't do that. It would be completely pointless and not even worth implementing - it would just generate even more bad publicity which is probably the only thing Google care about


I for one am glad they are going to do this, my only complaint is them saying they might do it several months away - they could easily launch this in a week if they wanted. Right now I have penalised sites losing out on serious cash through link warnings that were nothing to do with me.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

They may well not show more links, I honestly would be very surprised if they do it right away, , it may well be that which holds things up.

Nothing is a given with Google, other than google will do whatever Google want to do

They also have to put some sort of dampener on it to prevent reverse engineering of link values. If I were them this would be my main concern, SEO's revers engineering the backlinks.

 

[Suzuki]

If they don't show more links when they introduce the 'ignore links' feature then this will be a complete farce and will generate them far more negative publicity than if they'd simply done nothing at all. I just can't see how it would be viable for them to go down that route.

Its hard to work out the best way to do it to avoid attempts to reverse engineer... perhaps a time delay before links take effect. And a lesser time window that you have to either block that link or leave it live. Then if you don't block it in that time frame, it goes in the list of links that are counted and you can't change your mind later. Not perfect I know but it would limit the ability to let a link count first, then turn it off, and measure the before/after.

 

[SamWiseUKB]

Keep up to date with google as they are always changing how they look for websites. Meta keywords recently became useless.

There are a lot of conflicting ideas, and no right answer

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Keep up to date with google as they are always changing how they look for websites. Meta keywords recently became useless.

There are a lot of conflicting ideas, and no right answer

If you are referring to 1995 as 'recently' then I would agree

 

[SamWiseUKB]

I thought there was some recent changes too? As in this year? I'm new to SEO but it is eye opening!

 

[OldWelshGuy]

LOADS of changes. most recently Penguin1.1 which hit last weekend in may, and Panda 3.7 which hit on June 8th.

Neither related to keywords meta tag though

 

[SEO Lady]

Is it Reverse SEO or something else? If I am not wrong then it is reverse SEO only. Which is used to reduce rank of negative results or news.

What you are describing is positive SEO, combatting poor results and taking on your competitors who are performing better.

 

[SEO Lady]

You can now buy negative SEO in many places


<<<<< removed links to bad practice >>>>>>>>>>>>

 

[terryuk]

You can now buy negative SEO in many places
<<<<<removed bad links>>>>>>>>>>>>

Just search rubbish SEO on Google, you should find plenty who can fulfill requirements

 

[Suzuki]

One thing I find hilarious is that if you go to somewhere like Warrior Forum or Black Hat World etc, there are a load of people selling all these spammy garbage link packages going on about how you can crush google and rank for everything etc. Then 2 threads down you've got someone selling the exact same thing but the sales pitch says it'll wipe out the rankings of whatever competitor you point it at

 

[Ali-v-8]

It explains why you can only see a few of the links now.