Google has updated "Can competitors harm ranking?" help article

[suzukik]

Google has updated a help document about so-called Negative SEO.

Can competitors harm ranking? - Webmaster Tools Help [support.google.com]

Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.

Previously they said, "There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." The phrase is now gone.

[londrum]

facebook have got one huge advantage over google -- people i'd love to see the figures, but i'd imagine that most people start their search through their browser's search box, rather than going direct to google (or facebook). so maybe that will be a reason why a facebook search engine wont take off. facebook users will use it because its handy, but would they really make it their default search engine in their brower?

and no one's going to sign up to facebook just to use their search engine. it will primarily be a member's thing

[aakk9999]

Ignore links from bad sites, period. They don't count, they just disappear from the link graph. That would put an end to link buying, and negative SEO.

If this is publicly known, this is not a good solution. Spammers would just threw billions of links knowing good ones will stick and bad ones will be ignored. There would be no incentive of being careful with links. Whilst the current situation is far from ideal, at least you must be careful with own link building and with regards to negative SEO there is at least a small doubt that cheap links could be ignored or even help the site being attacked.

[AndyA]

aakk9999 wrote:

If this is publicly known, this is not a good solution. Spammers would just threw billions of links knowing good ones will stick and bad ones will be ignored.

The good links that stick won't for long, because a spammer won't just place one or two good links on a site once they figure out links on that site are working. They'll place lots more. Eventually, a pattern will develop and that site won't matter.

Site owners will have to start taking responsibility for the links that appear on their sites. If they can't or don't want to check them, they'll have to "nofollow" them so links don't count, or their site will be added to the long list of bad neighborhood sites by Google and they won't matter anyway.

If a particular site owner develops a history of sites that operate in this manner, new sites that owner puts online could be devalued from the beginning, so links on those sites don't matter, since they have a history of link manipulation. It might actually become easier to create quality sites that compete fairly instead of creating sites just for the sake of manipulating the SERPs.

Google has to remove the ability for a third party to influence a site they aren't in control of. Until they do, Google's SERPs are compromised and do not represent the best pages for a search query, nor do they provide a good user experience.

[crobb305]

Google has to remove the ability for a third party to influence a site they aren't in control of. Until they do, Google's SERPs are compromised and do not represent the best pages for a search query, nor do they provide a good user experience.

Like everyone keeps saying, they should just devalue the links in the same way they gave them credit. But to classify a whole document as spam and instate a penalty that causes the content to go supplemental for exact snippets is absurd. They need to rethink this. Consumers searching for my company name aren't finding it. Interestingly, I've been getting more referrals from Bing/Yahoo on searches for my site's name.

[mihomes]

This is probably the thing that really upsets me the most about Google... at the moment I have a suspect site which is linking to me around 150 times on their site! I have contacted the webmaster through the whois information (the site does not have any contact information on it) and can only hope something is done. I also contacted Google about it, but doubt I will here anything from them about it.

[mihomes]

Just looked at the updated page - "Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages."

HAHAHA - so WE can control the content of OTHER people's sites!? That has to be one of Google's best comments yet!

[crobb305]

Just looked at the updated page - "Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages."

HAHAHA - so WE can control the content of OTHER people's sites!? That has to be one of Google's best comments yet!

so true.

[diberry]

Maybe Google has entered that stage of deep paranoia that so often accompanies great power, and they actually think we are all sitting around conspiring together to bring them down... in which case, of course you could just lean over and say, "Hey, buddy, take down those links to me - Google's foiled us again" and twirl your mustache.