GoogleBowling, Negative SEO & Outing

...part of the point of this post was that indeed sites can get hit during future updates if others target them with negative SEO.

Even if you do "mind your own SEO" others can still get you hit, as things are currently programmed inside Google.

Google let some of the massive spam link networks run for a while (I think in part because they were dealing with hacked site issues and then Panda) & then wanted to hit the spam link networks hard ... sort of making up for lost time ... but in hitting them hard they quickly created yet another SEO service those folks can use & sell.

Ultimately this will likely only speed Google's push toward identity integration in search. Google+ (or maybe Twitter, if Google buys it) will at some point become a much bigger deal.

...imagine what it is like running a pretty clean but decently large SEO firm that caters to small businesses & has fairly tight margins. Then a bunch of clients get these messages & some quit, while others turn you in for something you didn't do (and perhaps some of what they turned you in for was done by an earlier lower quality provider that was spam city), while others still need hours and hours of hand holding and trust rebuilding to stay onboard. All those things cut into margins & that is just at the external consultant level.

I bet some in-house SEOs might lose their jobs over some such stray warnings (either because they mentioned it & said they were uncertain what to do, or because they didn't mention it right away and when they later did that made them be seen as one who was withholding information from the company).

And then when you get down to the individual small business owner that is trying to do SEO themselves...this is just one more layer of uncertainty, confusion & wasted resources.

... Getting targeted & hit is still not too likely in most markets. And if Google gets a sense that this stuff is ramping up they will likely change their approach somewhat.

But generally speaking, the stronger your site's profile is & the more balanced it is (lots of high quality links, not pushing too hard on anchor text, good usage data with loads of brand searches, etc.) the harder it is to knock out. Whereas if your links are mostly lower quality, user experience data is weak & you are pushing hard on anchor text you might be able to accidentally penalize or filter yourself (even without the help of anyone else).

Goldilocks SEO = slightly lower short term returns, but also lower risks.

People might be able to get individual pages on some strong sites hit, but it would be quite hard (likely impossible really) to completely take out something like eBay.com or Amazon.com.

...I disagree with the thesis entirely.

Your other bits are spot on...but understanding the "reputation problem" requires analyzing who wins from it and how.

The reason SEO has a bad reputation is that it is convenient for Google, some non-SEO web workers, & some alleged "white hat" SEO players for the industry to have a bad reputation.

• If SEO is seen as risky then that retards people actively investing in SEO & that gives Google a stronger editorial control over what ranks where. It also makes AdWords feel/seem more appealing. Double win for Google.
• Some web designers like the idea of SEO experts seeming sketchy so that there isn't a separate need for said experts & the designers can charge their clients extra for not doing actual SEO work then tell their clients "the SEO is in the code."
• A lot of the "white hat" SEO players also want to give the perception that stuff is spammy if they don't do it. That others are full of risk means others are less appealing. Follow their magical white hat ways and you too can rank - risk free (except, in reality, risk is everywhere). Yet anything they haven't tested is labeled as black hat simply because it is new and they haven't tried it yet. What goes unmentioned by these folks, is the stuff that they out as spam (when it is done by a competitor) is often stuff that they later teach as "advanced" 6 or 12 months later.
• Business is about getting returns. The question is primarily who gets them, how much do they get & how long do they get them for? Who funded eHow? Well that was Google.
• The reality is if 100% of SEOs were "white hat" then Google's guidelines would only grow that much more restrictive to further restrict profit potential. In reality all this stuff is a matter of give and take. Google keeps evolving their algorithms & eventually SEO will be so darn hard to do that it won't be worth attempting for many folks, but whenever Google closes one thing off they often open up other things. For instance, the excessive weight on domain authority is precisely what helped the content farm problem grow to epic proportions before it got wiped away.

Granted there are some scammers who rip off clients, but the people who do that stuff aren't really SEOs...they are scammers. The narrative of "Google sends flood of free traffic to your website that acts as an annuity for the rest of your life" is a sales pitch that many uninitiated folks will fall for without doing any research. But if they were entertaining cold calls & reading spam emails from marketers promising them $20,000 or $100,000 a month forever for a couple thousand Dollar one-time fee, then weren't they sort of looking for a scam?

The folks at Traffic Power were not SEOs...they were scammers. According to the Wall Street Journal, their CEO was allegedly involved in gang activity & after he exited the SEO scene he was arrested for doing something like mortgage scams.

Anywhere there is an appealing narrative & lots of money scammers will flock and sell themselves as being like the real thing, but when scammers were pushing get rich quick Google Money Tree reverse billing fraud (through Google ads even) somehow that didn't manage to be seen generally as "by Google." With that in mind & from that frame of reference, why should the SEO industry claim the impact of scammers who try to feed off the SEO industry as being something that is part of the SEO industry? It isn't ... it is scammers posing as SEOs. No different than boiler room stock salesmen, timeshare salesmen, and so on.

AND (and this part is important) just as often as an SEO company scams clients, there are likely a far greater number of prospective clients that try to scam the SEOs...

• merchants & affiliate networks that shave leads
• merchants who do profit share but fudge the numbers low
• companies that are expecting a 10,000% ROI quickly
• companies that claim to be up for longterm engagements, but can the SEO as soon as the rankings are achieved (and, worse yet, those who don't want to be on retainer but expect you to be available at the drop of a hat any time their rankings drop at all)
• companies that do other spammy stuff on the side & then outsource that blame onto the consultant if/when it finally catches up with them and causes issues
• etc etc etc

Finally, one last reason for the SEO reputation problem is that there can't be a strong counterbalance due to the structure (monopoly control) of the marketplace. When SEO works really well, there is no incentive to share the story of the success, as it might draw scrutiny from Google & invite competitors to clone some of the best pieces of the strategy.

Yeah, it's a useless test so far. The only SERP that has dropped ([seo book]) is one that...

1) I expected to drop because my existing WP theme died during a site move last week, forcing me to "de-optimize" the site itself
2) Fluctuates a lot because the only site that absolutely belongs there is, well, Aaron's.

I've never done any "link building" for the site. Hardly seemed necessary. People link to it enough on their own because they like my free book, and because there are a few important posts on it.

...the thread that mentioned Dan's site also mentioned another site tanking around the same time (I think it was NegativeSEO.me?)

Further, I know many SEOs who have filtered themselves out of the search results on accident by being too aggressive with link building and anchor text focus. I have even done it to myself a couple times over the years. ;)

If you can accidentally hose yourself, then surely someone else can do it to you as well.

And the issue isn't just anchor text, but also the quantity of links relative to the size of the existing profile & the age of the site. I have also seen older sites (like 4 or 5 years old) with few inbound links that ranked decently well get hit by a spike of links and drop back near the end of the SERPs for months.

Maybe Dan's site is old & authoritative enough that it is hard to knock down & keep down for an extended period of time, but it is super easy to hose new websites.

And if SEOs can accidentally do that sort of stuff to themselves, then of course someone else could do it to them well. Google doesn't have access to the credit card information every time someone buys a link.

Case closed.

In theory, negative SEO should not be possible.

In theory some of the spammy stuff that works shouldn't work either. But theory and reality are often misaligned...in accounting, economics, psychology, sociology, health & search. Only 100 years ago there were ads running about making your home into something like a beautiful castle using the power of asbestos. We are still messing many things up today...just look at all the financial fraud that was uncovered a few years ago & continues to this day.

If negative SEO services become more and more popular this will eventually reach a critical mass that will effect Google's SERPS enough to force Google to remove anything in the algo that is giving essentially 'negative link juice' Any sort of penalty should only be given out when there is clear indication both the referring and the target sites are being controlled by the same entity. Lots of 301 redirects would be an example of a fairly reliable/clear indicator. Some may say dupe IP addresses also, but there are many shared servers on one IP.

I agree with a lot of this, but redirects do not guarantee shared ownership...just that someone is more savvy, has more capital & has more scale. Also, how the algorithm is designed, there is not only the ability to harm people based on karma, but also based on excessive anchor text concentration.

If they ARE doing this

There is no IF. They are.

I would guess they expect they can use their massive resources to 'stay ahead of the game' They also may be relying on the fact that enough 'horror stories' about the Panda update will cause more and more businesses to be scared to utilize any services labeling themselves as SEO. There was an article I read a while back about your average person/business has a negative connotation association with "SEO" So if Google IS doing this it may be more about psychology than sound logic regarding the algo.

Well...Google constantly has to react. I mean, look at Panda. That wasn't "staying ahead of the game" but rather catching up from the fallout of funding eHow & similar enterprises. And someone mentioned that they had been working on that problem for a year before finding a solution. First the problem exists & then they try to solve it. I mean they are ahead of the game on some areas, but they can't be ahead of the game everywhere on all fronts. And if they were then this negative SEO stuff wouldn't be possible.

I agree on the concept that they are certainly using fear and framing to control the perception of SEO & I think that is working quite well for them so far as a tool of market regulation.

If someone has determined a way to consistently lower the rank of any website they choose (with exception of some of the larger properties like Amazon/Ebay, etc.), please PM me. I want to hire you! :)

Many have done exactly that & it is part of what makes our industry somewhat shitty.

If all the SEOs starting moving to a reverse strategy of sabotage/negative SEO, it should force Google to remove that part of the algo eventually. I think it is a case of a massive company with a lot of brainpower, money, and egos that can't accept the fact that their SERPS will always be able to be manipulated to a certain degree. Seems like it is all a game to me.

Lots of game theory certainly goes into their public relations and other efforts. Agree they are clever, but sometimes trying to prevent spam means they create some rather large problems, like the ability to do negative SEO.

I also agree that as it spreads eventually Google will have to change it at some point...just like almost everything else in search.

...there are also issues with anchor text profile filters and such.

So a link could still pass good karma, but send you over the limit of what is considered ordinary, in terms of anchor text distribution profile. Further, there can be issues with spikes in the rate of link acquisition which appear normal. At one point years ago Google even banned the official AdSense blog on accident & that was likely driven in part by the massive spike of inbound links while they were trying to clean up the huge mess of spam that was on blogspot at that point in time.

I am very surprised, that it is happened so fast, 8 days to get penalized.

yup...it can happen fast!

It seems, that the era of Google is gone, entering a phase of decadence. It is the same history, an empire cannot live forever. Google invented PR, the ranking by link popularity, making it with every update (nofollow, domain authority, Brand, etc.) more complex, introducing now, the negative link. The negative link has a history and there were signals in the past that this was coming to us, as a reset.

Google will be fine. But those who operate in Google's ecosystem have more things to think about, particularly if they lack the strong relevancy signals associated with a large global brand while operating in big money areas. Outside of perhaps some local businesses a lot of smaller businesses have been getting slowly squeezed out of the ecosystem for about a half-decade straight. This is just another layer of that trend.

It seems a perversion of the original idea, how to find the best and relevant resources, for the user input of search. The concepts are not easy to separate, a vote of trust from a vote that was bought. So the new era of social signals, will be the new guide, to distinguish, if a site are offering the demand, for which people are searching.

Some of the social signals are far easier to manipulate than regular SEO due to the viral nature of some messages on social networks. When Charlie Sheen was all over the news he was selling sponsored Tweets. Attention can be auctioned off in any format & it is far easier to do it quickly and efficiently in social than via search.

If someone hires Negative SEO it is a criminal act. I am seeing the mafia going in this field, scams, and more, investing money.

Certainly there will be people who say "pay me or I destroy your rankings."

The online presence of a business is not a game, is real life with real peoples.

The web was originally built with an over-representation of purists & idealists (like hobbyists vs large corporate players), somewhat sheltered from the harshness of the real world. But as the web becomes more like the real world, it takes on many more of its attributes & flaws.

These links are the easiest links ever to develop and it costs virtually nothing.

No doubt. I saw some scammy/shady link network advertised via a spam email yesterday where they promised 30,000 links PER MONTH for $26.

Very few websites have anywhere near that many links...let alone getting that many in a month. Some sites that have sold for millions of Dollars don't even have that many inbound links.

What I did when running link campaigns on a network was to include links to my competitors (using low value anchors but still "optimized") so that no one would be able to point the finger at me...guess what, those competitors have dropped in rankings at the same time I did.

This is the core problem with Google's approach: whodunit.

There are also many, many networks still active and working as intented...boosting rankings. What would stop a negative SEO practitioner to go nuts on those networks and then just reply to an unnatural link notice they have saved up and ratting those networks out..POOF.

I think this is one of Google's goals from their approach.

The question is what Google is going to do about other methods of link spam, the stuff that is even cheaper and easier to build crazy volumes of links with, the tools that exploit weaknesses in CMSes and un-moderated comment areas? Even if you don't own your own tools you can buy 200k blog comments for $30. If you own your own toolset it takes one hour to set-up a robust campaign and then let it run in infinity at no cost.

The more widespread something is & the more heavily marketed it is the quicker Google will address it.

Part of the reason those other methods were not marketed as heavily (and thus not as widely spread) is that they were harder to attach a recurring charge to than running a network is.

Also, what's funny to me is that the crackdown and penalizing sites for bad links is doing nothing to improve the quality of the SERPs for most high value niches. I mean, punishing for example insurance affiliates (since that's the popular niche to talk about these days I guess) that were using blog networks accomplishes ZERO improvement in SERP quality, it's just other sites with "dodgy" links that Google hasn't figured out how to combat yet that takes the available spots.

And you know what, that is OK since ALL those sites are offering exactly the same thing to the visitors and it happens to be WHAT the visitors want but it's useless to open up for destruction of innocents without improving something in any way.

I think your last sentence here explains why/how some editorial policies can be a bit arbitrary yet not cause enough damage to make Google immediately care. For any area that is valuable, there will be many people chasing it & willing to go after it. Even if many of them get routinely clipped many will head back to the same area again.

I think one point that Google feels is beneficial about the churn is that at some point many people will get burned out on starting over & perhaps in the end that will drive some of them to increase quality and longevity. Of course in some cases when the editorial policies are too harsh it pushes some percent of people in the opposite direction...as perceived risk goes higher investment in quality & longevity can go down while people push harder at whatever is working well right now.

both SearchMetrics & SEM Rush show similar fall offs for JustGoodCars.com

Google is a complex system. Complex systems inevitably have unpredictable emergent properties. I believe that "nobody can hurt you" is a design goal that Google has in mind, but they can't possibly guarantee that it would never happen. I would call Matt "optimistic" about it, but not a liar.

...but the court room is in pitch black when the evidence is considered.

...moving parts.

Some of the net effects & side impacts that are convenient may have some of the associated damage ignored or minimized in perception, but I don't think getting smoked on the SEO front is a good lead in to pitch AdWords. Its just like the sites that got hit by Panda for "poor user experience" and then Google pounded those webmasters telling them to add more ads to their site.

IMHO that sort of behavior is more down to general corporate dysfunction & ignoring externalities, rather than being a combination of malice and spite.

...into the launching and naming. Due to some false positives, they already backed off from the "webspam update" name to giving it the name of the Penguin update, but there is no way they completely reverse it. Stuff might get dialed down / loosen up over time, but they are not going to get rid of it all together anytime soon.

It is far easier to change our own strategies than to force change onto Google.

That's not to say they are always right or that all complaints are wrong, but if you want to force change onto Google you would need to do it via public relations and media exposure. That's not an easy game, especially since Google tilted their algorithms toward promoting the mainstream media with their universal search results news inclusion and then the dialing up of domain authority with the Panda update.

.... DuckDuckGo doesn't really have to threaten webmasters. They ride off of Bing's editorial and then add another editorial layer on top from there. Did you notice how during the holiday shopping season last year Bing toasted a lot of Black Friday and Cyber Monday affiliate websites timing it for maximum damage? I am also seeing Bing host health information on Bing.com that they rank in their own SERPs. In general Bing might not be as bad at discriminating against small businesses as Google is, but if they had Google's search marketshare I am sure they would be. They would probably be even worse, though they wouldn't paint the world in white & black and carry the "don't be evil" propaganda torch the way Google still tries to do.

Further, DuckDuckGo doesn't provide referral data to websites, so with analytics you are flying blind with them. & (just like Google & Bing) they try to pull some information directly into the SERPs from select sites so that a user never has to leave the SERP to reach their goal. That's great for search engines & sometimes good for users, but publishers basically give up all their value chain for a 0 in return on that stuff.

And Blekko has used being anti-spam heavily in their marketing, so again that is sort of similar. However they & DuckDuckGo are still new enough and small enough in search that they are not full-on trying to displace search results with their own nepotistic listings (like flight search, google places listings, youtube videos, product search, and so on).

The big thing that really needs to happen is a proper alignment of incentive structures. It hasn't though. It is hard for search engines to promote/feature paid content because the business model doesn't give much to the search engine & the user experience can be a bit rough if the path to monetization is too direct, overt & forced. It is hard to fund in-depth content creation when search engines fund thin rewrite sites that become more popular not based on being better, but because they are tied to a particular political slant people associate with. Further, so much of online advertising is based upon clicks driving revenues. If the content is really engaging then few people would click AdSense ads near the content. There really are lots of trade offs & whatever gets over-emphasized gets exploited, which is precisely why there is so many brutal changes.

The other area that is completely awful on the incentive structure front is when the search engines shag third party content, clone the business models of sites in their ecosystems & then preferentially rank themselves at the top. That is a case of the parasite eating the host. There are a number of sites covering that topic, like SearchNeutrality.org & FairSearch.org.

All the above said, I would prefer to have a more even market distribution in search, as it would force search engines to provide a better service & it would also lower the risk profile of online businesses, since getting hit in one search engine wouldn't mean the end of search as a business channel, whereas now a single Google hit can literally destroy businesses due to their concentrated marketshare.

...blocking your site from indexing is that there will always be some other site (maybe even one of lower quality) that is willing to soak up the free traffic. And if you have great content that is not indexed there is a good chance that some folks will scrape it and put it in the index for you (thus stealing your work & defeating the whole noindex exercise). This is a big problem with a one to many market...the central player has a dominant control, but individuals in the ecosystem have limited influence & the central player can give privileges to whoever does their biding.

A better way to beat Google if you don't like what they are doing is to lean into whatever they are doing on the relevancy front. If they over-represent authority sites you create pages on those sites. Too much YouTube in the SERPs? Time to break out the video camera. Etc.

What is really needed is a search engine that acts as a strong counter-balance. But most of the current search services are philosophically quite similar, even if the package looks different on the label.

...and your story/experience is becoming more commonplace in the current Google.

Most likely it will only get worse before it gets better, too. :(

Some people who get hit by this are going to start making some EXTREMELY high profile ranking problems until Google is forced to change this algorithmic hole.

...was that you can fill in your own blank & see what you want to see.