jsherloc - 8:35 am on Apr 12, 2012 (gmt 0)

@fathom, not quite sure where you are coming up with this "attitude" and ad hominem attacks towards me...I just mentioned what I have personally seen over the last year and what thousands of others are witnessing and reporting. Not sure why a handful of people in this industry literally become ANGRY when Google's practices are called into question on a large enough level. If there is no issue here, why doesn't Google just address it, instead of altering their webmaster guidelines recently and things of that nature? Hmmm

Just because we don't know exactly what goes on behind the scenes, doesn't mean we should just accept it as not potentially being a massive problem and move on considering recent reports IMO..obviously fathom you believe Google is capable of distinguishing things that most people in this industry find laughable considering their recent combo of manual/algo actions...we agree to disagree there OK.

Helping people get penalized? Really? Where in the world did you get that idea based on everything I have written. Yup, I just go around helping people get penalized and then make random posts on all the webmaster boards, I don't even develop websites or anything, great business model I am banking hard, are you for real here?

This type of "distraction nonsense" is exactly why these types of threads end up going nowhere on all the IM boards. I discussed specific examples of "unnatural" links answering you're "number 2" question above. We will never get the full backlink profile for ANY website we own, so everyone uses tools to the best of their abilities as I mentioned above. Certain types of links and a large enough percentage of certain types of links does damage to many URLs in my experiences and thousands of others experiences.

Now you state this is not so in your own experiences. "You guys are wrong because I've done my own test and Google is too powerful to let this happen" is essentially your position on this then?

"What Google can and can't do isn't something you can claim you know much about." Neither can you, but it seems that people's experiences throughout the industry align with the general sentiment that negative SEO is very possible for a large portion of websites on the Internet, increasingly more so as of late...does it not?

"Fact is... most people that buy links... are actually buying links." Yes, yes they are.

"Fact is... if you have proof that you paid for links that is proof that you did that not someone else. (I tested the competitor theory on my own website isn't a valid test)"

I am not following you here. You have no clue what types of tests are being conducted and have been conducted and reported on, and you do not know the ownership of the websites involved in these types of studies.

I never once suggested here that I have not personally seen this theory tested, and I have seen definitively "NEGATIVE" results when certain methods and processes were used on target URLs (notice I said URLs, not necessarily the whole site), some of which are completely layed out publicly now for all to digest and experiment with if they're so inclined to test the waters and come to their own conclusions.

So my own studies (the significant majority of them and NOT the client issues I was referring to above) seem to indicate negative SEO is very real for the majority of your "typical" websites. Your studies apparently do not.

I guess my question is where are all of the studies out there convincing all of us doomsdayers that we should just relax because Google clearly has it all handled A-OK? I do not come across many such pieces of info these days...but if its out there, by all means, let some of worriers know what is up!

[edited by: jsherloc at 8:50 am (utc) on Apr 12, 2012]