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Negative SEO Does Exist

252 points by searchmartin 12y ago

Last week Matt Cutts said at SMX advanced that negative SEO wasnt a thing. Rand Fishkin asked for evidence it does. Well....... hows this?

jacquesm 12y ago
I'm so happy google did this. For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine. Let me explain: When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com I was trying to achieve something positive. I did not realize how infested geocities had become with spammers, linkfarms and other trash. Probably at least a few million of the accounts were either compromised or somehow tricked into placing low value links on their pages at the behest of SEO types that were engaging in 'scalable link building'. Comment spam and so on. Very annoying. And I really did not know what to do about this, it felt wrong that I'd be contributing to these businesses somehow even in a peripheral way. And then google decided to penalize 'spammy links'. So the tables are turned. Not a day passes without some whiny email from some SEO character that is trying to clean up after their past misdeeds. They try to automate this of course (imagine that their trickery would no longer scale) so they spam tons of automated emails to webmasters threatening to use the google disavow tool because they have been penalized. So the tables are turned, for a change. Suddenly all those trashy links are degrading rather than enhancing the stature of these companies and their ill motivated SEO brethern. So, I hope this stays, as far as I'm concerned google can shut down the disavow tool and those that lived by the sword should die by the sword. It's like an 'own goal' by the bad element in the SEO community. At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). Especially since if a competitor successfully uses google as an offensive weapon that they can remain unidentified or undetected. (Which makes me wonder about the motives of the OP not to disclose who this was, it would be a lot easier to verify the story, and any subsequent retaliation could be dealt with in the same manner.) But overall this spammy links penalty is a good development. The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take manual action to remove the spam that was placed in an automated way by the perps in the past, that's a really bad balance there. I'm completely not impressed by these threats for reocities.com I only care that the content is online. I guess I could replace all the outbound links by 'nofollows' but that would hurt a lot of good sites as well and I really hope that google can tell the difference between 'good' and 'bad' links in this respect. (If they can't that would be a huge problem) edit: the voting on this comment is interesting, 1->+9->+1->+9->+5 Never had a comment oscillate like that.
- oddevan 12y ago
  > At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). That seems to be what people are most upset about.
- cosmie 12y ago
  > At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). That was the point being made - people are being targeted by their competitors, using the negative penalty from link farms to devalue competitor's sites. And Google can't tell the difference. You're right in that it's SEOs doing what they've always done, it just now has a penalty attached which gives unscrupulous ones a new service to offer and good SEO's a link-removal service. > The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take manual action to remove the spam that was placed in an automated way by the perps in the past, that's a really bad balance there. While it may be a manual action on Google's part, it's quickly becoming automated[1]. [1] http://www.removeem.com/ http://www.removeem.com/
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Yes, I know that is the point being made. But that's a very small bit of fall-out from a huge improvement. OP is right in fact but this is a rarity, overall google search results improved and the fact that the whole SEO world is in panic about this (proof in my inbox) is fantastic news. That it can be used for bad purposes is obvious, those that were gaming before will game this just as much. But rather than being in denial about negative SEO google should simply come clean about the numbers, any kind of classification system has false positives, a categoric denial is simply something you should not believe. And in spite of that Google should stay the course, they're not a court and nobody has an innate right to an x% of search traffic. If that were the case we could replace google with a link lottery.
huhtenberg 12y ago
How can it not exist? You basically take competitors site and run a standard SEO link farm thing on it. Google picks it up and punishes the site, done. What am I missing? How can Google tell the real motive behind detected SEO activity?
- searchmartin 12y ago
  watch the video in the post, its only 30 seconds long. The question was "does negative SEO exist", listen to the response. :)
  - huhtenberg 12y ago
    Sorry Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here. (edit) - It works now.
    - searchmartin 12y ago
      errrr- weird, works for me in the US - Ive just opened up the privacy restrictions on it though - try again? thanks for letting me know btw!
      - huhtenberg 12y ago
        Yup, works now, thanks. What else can he possibly say though? He can't explain how they protect against it, because it would negate the protection, and he can't say that don't do anything, because that would just raise a shitstorm.
        searchmartin 12y ago
        Yeah - agreed, Im not really against his position in as much that I realise he's stuck. If he did say "yeah, its possible, and it might screw your business up" then Google would have a massive PR problem. I've done a fair bit of Cutts baiting in the past, but I do have absolute respect for the man, and the position he's in (we SEO's dont make it easy for him a lot of the time)
viraptor 12y ago
I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most visible way to make a point that can't be denied. PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone would already give it a go by now.
- searchmartin 12y ago
  search google for mattcutts.com - you'll see another post of mine from last year, detailing some theory ;)
  - viraptor 12y ago
    Yes, I've seen you writing about it, but it was not done in the end. (at least not the link spamming that's mentioned in this article) Even worse, the article mentions "Any of those might work, but none are particularly reliable. Most actually stand a good chance of positively influencing their results instead." - which rather indicates that it's hard to do really negative SEO even if you try.
- johnward 12y ago
  Yes but Google has ways to manually override things. You don't think Cutts could get that done? It would be better to target some poor unsuspecting blogger but that would be pretty cruel.
  - viraptor 12y ago
    Could Matt do that - sure. Would he do that straight away, faster than the results can be captured, or does he have constant monitoring of his page - I doubt it. Still - nobody even tried as far as I can tell.
    - johnward 12y ago
      I don't know. I'm sure tons of spammers already target Matt's site (they all hate him). Google probably already has some kind of special exception for him.
andrenotgiant 12y ago
I think you need to break your argument into two parts. 1. People ARE creating spammy links that point to competitor sites in the hopes of damaging their search rankings. - You have proven this. 2. As a result of a competitor creating spammy links to your site, your rankings in Google have been permanently negatively effected. - I don't think the data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation. Lots of moving parts in Google's algorithm, the internet, your site... Did the site get warnings in Webmaster Tools? Did you go through the disavow links process? How long ago?
- johnward 12y ago
  Do you think google can determine that your spammy link came from you or some other "seo"? I don't. There already is proof that these spammy links damage your ranking since penguin. Google even admitted it. That was the entire point of those updates. The only thing they have avoided is coming out and saying "negative SEO is a thing". As long as rank penalties exist negative SEO will exist.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  > The data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation. As long as google keep the ranking details secret (i.e. always, with good reason) then absolute proof is hard. You're right that "Correlation does not equal causation" but it don't discount correlation entirely either. This evidence is enough to treat the claims that negative SEO does not happen with extreme scepticism. The burden of proof has moved. Given that there are penalties for some links, what is the mechanism that makes negative SEO non-existent? And how do you prove that this mechanism is infallible.
- matnewton85 12y ago
  Why are you even arguing with this? Do you have any experience with SEO? I use negative SEO regularly to drop sites out of the top 10 in Google. I only target low quality sites that shouldn't be in there anyway, but Google in all their algorithmic wisdom has ranked them, so... I knock them out. Low quality 5 page Adsense sites shouldn't outrank actual, legitimate businesses so it's just a case of click click, BOOM. I never target the actual competitors of my clients. Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. It just has to be.
johnward 12y ago
There is no way negative SEO doesn't exist. As long as Google penalizes sites for link schemes those same schemes could be used against their competitors. For example, say I'm running xrumer and spamming forums to increase my ranking, which was common pre-penguin. Google releases penguin and my sites rankings start to tank. So instead I switch to spamming my competitors links and Google penalizes them also. Good luck as a site owner trying to remove thousands of junk forum links especially when the forum owner thinks you were the spammer.
vijayaggarwal 12y ago
black hat SEO 2.0!
tboyd47 12y ago
Lobbying Google to reverse course now is surely a lost cause. Google has a vested interest in improving the user experience of Google. Not the profitability of every other site that has a symbiotic relationship with Google by optimizing against their ranking system. So even if you do have a quality site, and they did open a door to allow your competitors to blast you with bunk backlinks, all this is completely hidden from Google's user base and so they ultimately don't care. Maybe what website owners should do here, if they have lost considerable money, is file a class-action suit against Google. I'd actually be surprised if no one is doing this. This is a really interesting subject, anyway. Thanks for the post. I would love to hear a follow-up about how people with web properties can guard against negative SEO. Maybe by keeping your site registered under multiple domains at a time? Or moving your content around on the same domain with permanent redirects? I dunno, it really seems like this is changing the whole industry.
SeanDav 12y ago
I am no expert, but logically you could explain this behaviour of apparent negative SEO by Google discounting all links to "blue widgets" and the sites that market blue widgets that are now ranking higher, achieve this because of other links that are not being discounted by Google.
jgalt212 12y ago
Head of Google's Web Spam team is a position with too much power. For those dealing with Google, that's probably the second most powerful seat (after Larry/Sergey tie for first). Absolute power corrupts absolutely. As such, no one person should occupy this seat for any significant tenure. This comment is in no way a negative comment about Matt, just talking about the temptations one must face in such a powerful seat.
pistle 12y ago
Seems the SEO community might need to build a new b2b around punishing the blackhat SEO folks that attack their clients. SEO can go fight amongst itself to the death.
programminggeek 12y ago
I think there are two issues at play. 1) Google massively discounted exact match domains, so if you were ranking well before because of an EMD, don't expect to now. 2) Negative SEO has always been a possibility, but a lot of sites aren't helping themselves either. For like a decade now, there have been plenty of shady link networks where you could get millions of links. It would not be difficult to get millions of spam links with the same anchor text and make it look like Blue Widgets was spamming. It's not important whether a link is spammy or not, it matters if it's helping you rank better, is being discounted, or if it's penalizing you. It is possible that those links existed before the Google updates and were helping blue widgets.com rank better. Then Google discounted the spammy links and the EMD, and now the site isn't ranking. It's also possible that Google is penalizing those links. In the end, spam links don't come with a great big attribution of how they got there, who put them there, and what the intent is. A link is a vote. Just like votes, you can stuff the ballot box or you can make it look like your competitor is stuffing the ballot box. In the end nobody is entitled to rank well on Google search for any reason at all. They could order by rand() tomorrow and you're up a creek.
- underdown 12y ago
  The exact match domain nerf was like two years ago.
- tiglionabbit 12y ago
  He could check how long the spam sites have existed by using archive.org.
logicallee 12y ago
I think there's a very good argument to be made that negative SEO should be illegal, with punishment/compensation similar to that of slander and libel in the United States. (Which are incredibly specific, due to free speech issues.) Why should slander and libel be illegal at all - why can't anyone say, claim, or publish anything they want whatsoever? If you reflect on that the reason is fairly obvious. Likewise, if negative SEO were illegal, it might have the same benefits. Of course technically the standard would be much different from slander/libel, but the fundamental reason that we would limit free speech in this way is clear. It is just more damaging to the person being damaged than the limit on the free speech that it imposes costs us. (Which is taken seriously in the United States). So, for this reason, there is a good argument to be made for specific, nuanced, laws against negative SEO in the form of civil penalties. I would support such a law.
- Ryan_Jones 12y ago
  This takes us down a very slippery slope. Linking, is not illegal and I think we can all agree that the web would be ruined if simply adding a link to a site you own or control were made illegal. So that raises the question: How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link? Pretty soon you'd have people arrested for linking to somebody's site from a news article or to/from sites like ripoffreport.
  - rlpb 12y ago
    > How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link? By intent. Intent is something that law has always considered. No need for an exception here.
    - logicallee 12y ago
      Yes. It's certainly a slippery slope but we can navigate it intelligently (as we do with defamation) and it's worth it to keep people from building link farms pointing to a competitor so that Google will punish them.
      - 12y ago
mattmaroon 12y ago
I don't understand how negative SEO could not exist. Google is cracking down on people buying back links right? If I bought links for a competitor's website, wouldn't it stand to reason they'll be punished? Google has no idea who is doing the purchasing. (You could replace buying links with any action Google' algo punishes.) As long as Google's algorithm has punitive measures in it from something that happens off of your site, it stands to reason a competitor could do those things on your behalf.
anonymfus 12y ago
For Google solution could be to penalise only for links placed before the date of update.
codeddesign 12y ago
how is this at the top of HN? this news is well over a year old
gscott 12y ago
I have tested negative seo to force a couple of websites out of listing positions that I had once and it works fine. What you do is buy multiple 50k "xrumer" postings with "pingbacks" for that website you want gone. Add in some spammy Fiverr jobs plus buy some links for that website you want gone on Text-Link-Ads then report that website as having paid links. This method works 100% of the time. This creates such a firestorm of links a webmaster would have to spend a month trying to disavow them and a lot of times webmasters don't even know what disavow means. Google is so worried about spamming and punishing websites rather then just ignoring the bad data. Since Google is out to punish and Google... it's a computer program it can't tell one thing from another other then these junk links exist therefor the hammer must be brought down on the webmaster who has no idea of what is going on. This was a year or more ago but I promise that this would work fine today. The smaller the website the better it works. Try it against a mega website and this would be ineffective because of the ratio of good links that they have.
- Isofarro 12y ago
  "This method works 100% of the time" How many sites did you try this on? One? In your existing setup, how many competitors could you take out now before Google notices the pattern you've adopted? Take a look at the footprint: * Site suddenly acquires a new batch of incoming links * Same site is reported for being a recipient of a paid-for links scheme * Reporter uses the email address of (your email address here) -- I love the dichotomy of blackhats despising/hating Google, yet reaching out over and over again pretending to be a good citizen. How many times and variations of that can you come up with before standing out? And when the pattern emerges, Google are in a position to re-address the balance. This switch Google has done from inaction to penalty for spammy links has changed the spamming game. No positive benefit from spamming is a good thing. Spammers can only create negative damage with their existing setup, until they out themselves by being trackable/detectable.
  - bjterry 12y ago
    You are being insufficiently creative. If there are 10 competitors in your niche (and many will have more like 100), you can do this to five of them at random and google would have no way of determining who the perpetrator was. When you report them for paid-links, you wouldn't use your real e-mail address, that doesn't make any sense. There is no way to tell self backlinks from competitor backlinks. Both are attempted to be carried out in secret and in identical fashion from google's perspective. I could imagine a scenario where google sees that a niche has a bunch of people being targeted with backlinks, and so stops applying the penalty, but still they would have no way of targeting the bad actor.
nkozyra 12y ago
If there is a way to be penalized via blackhat SEO there will always be the possibility of negative / competitive SEO.
drakaal 12y ago
I do reputation management at http://www.blackwaterops.com http://www.blackwaterops.com a large portion of that is "negative" SEO. It doesn't all have to be "bad neighbor" linking. Negative SEO can be contacting the people who are lending authority to a link and getting them to "nofollow" or remove the link. Negative SEO can also be convincing Google to AutoSuggest things that don't paint your competition in a good light. "Cheezy Poofs Calories" seems like things people might ask, but people will reconsider if they want Cheezy poofs if the top suggestions in Google's autocomplete is "Cheezy Poofs Explosive Diarrhea" or "Cheezy Poofs Rectum Rash" Or better yet both. That all Said. Bad Neighbor penalties and the ability to get a site delisted by link bombing has been well known for a long time. Anything that you could do to try and get your self upranked but that is sketchy could also be used to get your competitor delisted. One thing to note however, is that along the way typically that competitor gets insane rankings just before getting delisted. That isn't always worth it. -Brandon Wirtz (I Google Bombed my Way to being Greatest Living American) http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2007/05/11/the-greatest-googled-american/ http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2007/05/11/the-greatest-goo...
sudorank 12y ago
Negative SEO has been around for years, the mainstream SEO community have only just realised it. It's going to be at-least another year until the exact methods are discovered though because of the reasons I detailed here: http://www.sudorank.com/rand-fishkin-wont-ever-see-negative-seo-example/ http://www.sudorank.com/rand-fishkin-wont-ever-see-negative-... Until then people's businesses will be burned and Google won't really do much about it, always slow to react!
J2B2 12y ago
I worked at an SEO firm that had a range of client sites, including two of the three companies with the largest search engines. As with every update a large amount of speculation, with little data analysis, would pop up. Content, Improper site setup, canonical tags, robot.txt changes, there are a significant number of issues that can impact rankings. Unfortunately, instead of checking these owners of the site would always speculate that the impact was due to some new factor that certain SEO firms would perpetuate for marketing purposes. If your to learn anything from these types of articles, its know your audience and create content for them.
xor-ed-wolf 12y ago
This article is enlightening but offers no solutions or advices. Why had I read that?
tambourine_man 12y ago
We desperately need open and distributed database and search algorithms. As it stands now, we are at the mercy of a company's competence and benevolence. Google is getting less usable by the day. Verbatim and code search don't work anymore and the relevance of results keep decreasing dispite the many revision animals they release.

252 points by searchmartin 12y ago

Last week Matt Cutts said at SMX advanced that negative SEO wasnt a thing. Rand Fishkin asked for evidence it does. Well....... hows this?

jacquesm 12y ago

I'm so happy google did this. For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine. Let me explain: When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com I was trying to achieve something positive. I did not realize how infested geocities had become with spammers, linkfarms and other trash. Probably at least a few million of the accounts were either compromised or somehow tricked into placing low value links on their pages at the behest of SEO types that were engaging in 'scalable link building'. Comment spam and so on. Very annoying. And I really did not know what to do about this, it felt wrong that I'd be contributing to these businesses somehow even in a peripheral way. And then google decided to penalize 'spammy links'. So the tables are turned. Not a day passes without some whiny email from some SEO character that is trying to clean up after their past misdeeds. They try to automate this of course (imagine that their trickery would no longer scale) so they spam tons of automated emails to webmasters threatening to use the google disavow tool because they have been penalized. So the tables are turned, for a change. Suddenly all those trashy links are degrading rather than enhancing the stature of these companies and their ill motivated SEO brethern. So, I hope this stays, as far as I'm concerned google can shut down the disavow tool and those that lived by the sword should die by the sword. It's like an 'own goal' by the bad element in the SEO community. At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). Especially since if a competitor successfully uses google as an offensive weapon that they can remain unidentified or undetected. (Which makes me wonder about the motives of the OP not to disclose who this was, it would be a lot easier to verify the story, and any subsequent retaliation could be dealt with in the same manner.) But overall this spammy links penalty is a good development. The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take manual action to remove the spam that was placed in an automated way by the perps in the past, that's a really bad balance there. I'm completely not impressed by these threats for reocities.com I only care that the content is online. I guess I could replace all the outbound links by 'nofollows' but that would hurt a lot of good sites as well and I really hope that google can tell the difference between 'good' and 'bad' links in this respect. (If they can't that would be a huge problem) edit: the voting on this comment is interesting, 1->+9->+1->+9->+5 Never had a comment oscillate like that.

oddevan 12y ago
> At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). That seems to be what people are most upset about.
cosmie 12y ago
> At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). That was the point being made - people are being targeted by their competitors, using the negative penalty from link farms to devalue competitor's sites. And Google can't tell the difference. You're right in that it's SEOs doing what they've always done, it just now has a penalty attached which gives unscrupulous ones a new service to offer and good SEO's a link-removal service. > The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take manual action to remove the spam that was placed in an automated way by the perps in the past, that's a really bad balance there. While it may be a manual action on Google's part, it's quickly becoming automated[1]. [1] http://www.removeem.com/ http://www.removeem.com/
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Yes, I know that is the point being made. But that's a very small bit of fall-out from a huge improvement. OP is right in fact but this is a rarity, overall google search results improved and the fact that the whole SEO world is in panic about this (proof in my inbox) is fantastic news. That it can be used for bad purposes is obvious, those that were gaming before will game this just as much. But rather than being in denial about negative SEO google should simply come clean about the numbers, any kind of classification system has false positives, a categoric denial is simply something you should not believe. And in spite of that Google should stay the course, they're not a court and nobody has an innate right to an x% of search traffic. If that were the case we could replace google with a link lottery.

huhtenberg 12y ago

How can it not exist? You basically take competitors site and run a standard SEO link farm thing on it. Google picks it up and punishes the site, done. What am I missing? How can Google tell the real motive behind detected SEO activity?

searchmartin 12y ago
watch the video in the post, its only 30 seconds long. The question was "does negative SEO exist", listen to the response. :)
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  Sorry Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here. (edit) - It works now.
  - searchmartin 12y ago
    errrr- weird, works for me in the US - Ive just opened up the privacy restrictions on it though - try again? thanks for letting me know btw!
    - huhtenberg 12y ago
      Yup, works now, thanks. What else can he possibly say though? He can't explain how they protect against it, because it would negate the protection, and he can't say that don't do anything, because that would just raise a shitstorm.
      - searchmartin 12y ago
        Yeah - agreed, Im not really against his position in as much that I realise he's stuck. If he did say "yeah, its possible, and it might screw your business up" then Google would have a massive PR problem. I've done a fair bit of Cutts baiting in the past, but I do have absolute respect for the man, and the position he's in (we SEO's dont make it easy for him a lot of the time)

viraptor 12y ago

I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most visible way to make a point that can't be denied. PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone would already give it a go by now.

searchmartin 12y ago
search google for mattcutts.com - you'll see another post of mine from last year, detailing some theory ;)
- viraptor 12y ago
  Yes, I've seen you writing about it, but it was not done in the end. (at least not the link spamming that's mentioned in this article) Even worse, the article mentions "Any of those might work, but none are particularly reliable. Most actually stand a good chance of positively influencing their results instead." - which rather indicates that it's hard to do really negative SEO even if you try.
johnward 12y ago
Yes but Google has ways to manually override things. You don't think Cutts could get that done? It would be better to target some poor unsuspecting blogger but that would be pretty cruel.
- viraptor 12y ago
  Could Matt do that - sure. Would he do that straight away, faster than the results can be captured, or does he have constant monitoring of his page - I doubt it. Still - nobody even tried as far as I can tell.
  - johnward 12y ago
    I don't know. I'm sure tons of spammers already target Matt's site (they all hate him). Google probably already has some kind of special exception for him.

andrenotgiant 12y ago

I think you need to break your argument into two parts. 1. People ARE creating spammy links that point to competitor sites in the hopes of damaging their search rankings. - You have proven this. 2. As a result of a competitor creating spammy links to your site, your rankings in Google have been permanently negatively effected. - I don't think the data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation. Lots of moving parts in Google's algorithm, the internet, your site... Did the site get warnings in Webmaster Tools? Did you go through the disavow links process? How long ago?

johnward 12y ago
Do you think google can determine that your spammy link came from you or some other "seo"? I don't. There already is proof that these spammy links damage your ranking since penguin. Google even admitted it. That was the entire point of those updates. The only thing they have avoided is coming out and saying "negative SEO is a thing". As long as rank penalties exist negative SEO will exist.
SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
> The data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation. As long as google keep the ranking details secret (i.e. always, with good reason) then absolute proof is hard. You're right that "Correlation does not equal causation" but it don't discount correlation entirely either. This evidence is enough to treat the claims that negative SEO does not happen with extreme scepticism. The burden of proof has moved. Given that there are penalties for some links, what is the mechanism that makes negative SEO non-existent? And how do you prove that this mechanism is infallible.
matnewton85 12y ago
Why are you even arguing with this? Do you have any experience with SEO? I use negative SEO regularly to drop sites out of the top 10 in Google. I only target low quality sites that shouldn't be in there anyway, but Google in all their algorithmic wisdom has ranked them, so... I knock them out. Low quality 5 page Adsense sites shouldn't outrank actual, legitimate businesses so it's just a case of click click, BOOM. I never target the actual competitors of my clients. Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. It just has to be.

johnward 12y ago

There is no way negative SEO doesn't exist. As long as Google penalizes sites for link schemes those same schemes could be used against their competitors. For example, say I'm running xrumer and spamming forums to increase my ranking, which was common pre-penguin. Google releases penguin and my sites rankings start to tank. So instead I switch to spamming my competitors links and Google penalizes them also. Good luck as a site owner trying to remove thousands of junk forum links especially when the forum owner thinks you were the spammer.

vijayaggarwal 12y ago

black hat SEO 2.0!

tboyd47 12y ago

Lobbying Google to reverse course now is surely a lost cause. Google has a vested interest in improving the user experience of Google. Not the profitability of every other site that has a symbiotic relationship with Google by optimizing against their ranking system. So even if you do have a quality site, and they did open a door to allow your competitors to blast you with bunk backlinks, all this is completely hidden from Google's user base and so they ultimately don't care. Maybe what website owners should do here, if they have lost considerable money, is file a class-action suit against Google. I'd actually be surprised if no one is doing this. This is a really interesting subject, anyway. Thanks for the post. I would love to hear a follow-up about how people with web properties can guard against negative SEO. Maybe by keeping your site registered under multiple domains at a time? Or moving your content around on the same domain with permanent redirects? I dunno, it really seems like this is changing the whole industry.

SeanDav 12y ago

I am no expert, but logically you could explain this behaviour of apparent negative SEO by Google discounting all links to "blue widgets" and the sites that market blue widgets that are now ranking higher, achieve this because of other links that are not being discounted by Google.

jgalt212 12y ago

Head of Google's Web Spam team is a position with too much power. For those dealing with Google, that's probably the second most powerful seat (after Larry/Sergey tie for first). Absolute power corrupts absolutely. As such, no one person should occupy this seat for any significant tenure. This comment is in no way a negative comment about Matt, just talking about the temptations one must face in such a powerful seat.

pistle 12y ago

Seems the SEO community might need to build a new b2b around punishing the blackhat SEO folks that attack their clients. SEO can go fight amongst itself to the death.

programminggeek 12y ago

I think there are two issues at play. 1) Google massively discounted exact match domains, so if you were ranking well before because of an EMD, don't expect to now. 2) Negative SEO has always been a possibility, but a lot of sites aren't helping themselves either. For like a decade now, there have been plenty of shady link networks where you could get millions of links. It would not be difficult to get millions of spam links with the same anchor text and make it look like Blue Widgets was spamming. It's not important whether a link is spammy or not, it matters if it's helping you rank better, is being discounted, or if it's penalizing you. It is possible that those links existed before the Google updates and were helping blue widgets.com rank better. Then Google discounted the spammy links and the EMD, and now the site isn't ranking. It's also possible that Google is penalizing those links. In the end, spam links don't come with a great big attribution of how they got there, who put them there, and what the intent is. A link is a vote. Just like votes, you can stuff the ballot box or you can make it look like your competitor is stuffing the ballot box. In the end nobody is entitled to rank well on Google search for any reason at all. They could order by rand() tomorrow and you're up a creek.

underdown 12y ago
The exact match domain nerf was like two years ago.
tiglionabbit 12y ago
He could check how long the spam sites have existed by using archive.org.

logicallee 12y ago

I think there's a very good argument to be made that negative SEO should be illegal, with punishment/compensation similar to that of slander and libel in the United States. (Which are incredibly specific, due to free speech issues.) Why should slander and libel be illegal at all - why can't anyone say, claim, or publish anything they want whatsoever? If you reflect on that the reason is fairly obvious. Likewise, if negative SEO were illegal, it might have the same benefits. Of course technically the standard would be much different from slander/libel, but the fundamental reason that we would limit free speech in this way is clear. It is just more damaging to the person being damaged than the limit on the free speech that it imposes costs us. (Which is taken seriously in the United States). So, for this reason, there is a good argument to be made for specific, nuanced, laws against negative SEO in the form of civil penalties. I would support such a law.

Ryan_Jones 12y ago
This takes us down a very slippery slope. Linking, is not illegal and I think we can all agree that the web would be ruined if simply adding a link to a site you own or control were made illegal. So that raises the question: How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link? Pretty soon you'd have people arrested for linking to somebody's site from a news article or to/from sites like ripoffreport.
- rlpb 12y ago
  > How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link? By intent. Intent is something that law has always considered. No need for an exception here.
  - logicallee 12y ago
    Yes. It's certainly a slippery slope but we can navigate it intelligently (as we do with defamation) and it's worth it to keep people from building link farms pointing to a competitor so that Google will punish them.
    - 12y ago

mattmaroon 12y ago

I don't understand how negative SEO could not exist. Google is cracking down on people buying back links right? If I bought links for a competitor's website, wouldn't it stand to reason they'll be punished? Google has no idea who is doing the purchasing. (You could replace buying links with any action Google' algo punishes.) As long as Google's algorithm has punitive measures in it from something that happens off of your site, it stands to reason a competitor could do those things on your behalf.

anonymfus 12y ago

For Google solution could be to penalise only for links placed before the date of update.

codeddesign 12y ago

how is this at the top of HN? this news is well over a year old

gscott 12y ago

I have tested negative seo to force a couple of websites out of listing positions that I had once and it works fine. What you do is buy multiple 50k "xrumer" postings with "pingbacks" for that website you want gone. Add in some spammy Fiverr jobs plus buy some links for that website you want gone on Text-Link-Ads then report that website as having paid links. This method works 100% of the time. This creates such a firestorm of links a webmaster would have to spend a month trying to disavow them and a lot of times webmasters don't even know what disavow means. Google is so worried about spamming and punishing websites rather then just ignoring the bad data. Since Google is out to punish and Google... it's a computer program it can't tell one thing from another other then these junk links exist therefor the hammer must be brought down on the webmaster who has no idea of what is going on. This was a year or more ago but I promise that this would work fine today. The smaller the website the better it works. Try it against a mega website and this would be ineffective because of the ratio of good links that they have.

Isofarro 12y ago
"This method works 100% of the time" How many sites did you try this on? One? In your existing setup, how many competitors could you take out now before Google notices the pattern you've adopted? Take a look at the footprint: * Site suddenly acquires a new batch of incoming links * Same site is reported for being a recipient of a paid-for links scheme * Reporter uses the email address of (your email address here) -- I love the dichotomy of blackhats despising/hating Google, yet reaching out over and over again pretending to be a good citizen. How many times and variations of that can you come up with before standing out? And when the pattern emerges, Google are in a position to re-address the balance. This switch Google has done from inaction to penalty for spammy links has changed the spamming game. No positive benefit from spamming is a good thing. Spammers can only create negative damage with their existing setup, until they out themselves by being trackable/detectable.
- bjterry 12y ago
  You are being insufficiently creative. If there are 10 competitors in your niche (and many will have more like 100), you can do this to five of them at random and google would have no way of determining who the perpetrator was. When you report them for paid-links, you wouldn't use your real e-mail address, that doesn't make any sense. There is no way to tell self backlinks from competitor backlinks. Both are attempted to be carried out in secret and in identical fashion from google's perspective. I could imagine a scenario where google sees that a niche has a bunch of people being targeted with backlinks, and so stops applying the penalty, but still they would have no way of targeting the bad actor.

nkozyra 12y ago

If there is a way to be penalized via blackhat SEO there will always be the possibility of negative / competitive SEO.

drakaal 12y ago

I do reputation management at http://www.blackwaterops.com http://www.blackwaterops.com a large portion of that is "negative" SEO. It doesn't all have to be "bad neighbor" linking. Negative SEO can be contacting the people who are lending authority to a link and getting them to "nofollow" or remove the link. Negative SEO can also be convincing Google to AutoSuggest things that don't paint your competition in a good light. "Cheezy Poofs Calories" seems like things people might ask, but people will reconsider if they want Cheezy poofs if the top suggestions in Google's autocomplete is "Cheezy Poofs Explosive Diarrhea" or "Cheezy Poofs Rectum Rash" Or better yet both. That all Said. Bad Neighbor penalties and the ability to get a site delisted by link bombing has been well known for a long time. Anything that you could do to try and get your self upranked but that is sketchy could also be used to get your competitor delisted. One thing to note however, is that along the way typically that competitor gets insane rankings just before getting delisted. That isn't always worth it. -Brandon Wirtz (I Google Bombed my Way to being Greatest Living American) http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2007/05/11/the-greatest-googled-american/ http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2007/05/11/the-greatest-goo...

sudorank 12y ago

Negative SEO has been around for years, the mainstream SEO community have only just realised it. It's going to be at-least another year until the exact methods are discovered though because of the reasons I detailed here: http://www.sudorank.com/rand-fishkin-wont-ever-see-negative-seo-example/ http://www.sudorank.com/rand-fishkin-wont-ever-see-negative-... Until then people's businesses will be burned and Google won't really do much about it, always slow to react!

J2B2 12y ago

I worked at an SEO firm that had a range of client sites, including two of the three companies with the largest search engines. As with every update a large amount of speculation, with little data analysis, would pop up. Content, Improper site setup, canonical tags, robot.txt changes, there are a significant number of issues that can impact rankings. Unfortunately, instead of checking these owners of the site would always speculate that the impact was due to some new factor that certain SEO firms would perpetuate for marketing purposes. If your to learn anything from these types of articles, its know your audience and create content for them.

xor-ed-wolf 12y ago

This article is enlightening but offers no solutions or advices. Why had I read that?

tambourine_man 12y ago

We desperately need open and distributed database and search algorithms. As it stands now, we are at the mercy of a company's competence and benevolence. Google is getting less usable by the day. Verbatim and code search don't work anymore and the relevance of results keep decreasing dispite the many revision animals they release.