Has The Most Recent Google Update Made Negative SEO Easier?

[engine]

Negative SEO: Possibly one of the webmaster's worst nightmares.

I'd like to speculate that negative SEO is now much easier to do now than it was prior to google's latest updates.

Are we seeing more evidence to confirm this? There's certainly more talk of negative SEO.

We all know that links revolving around bad neighbourhoods can cause problems for a site, and it's relatively easy to generate hundreds, if not thousands of links automatically, and fairly easily putting a site on the automated radar at google. These links can also be generated manually, one-by-one, to slowly creep up on a site.

It's now more important than ever to have a GWT account to look out for these issues developing, and to deal with them that much faster if we're to avoid problems.

What's your view: Is it now easier to run negative SEO campaigns, and how would you deal with the problem?

[ogletree]

For years we have always been saying Google won't do this because we could just tank our competitors. I guess Google finally stopped listening to us. Google created a system that worked great as long as nobody knew about it. Once Google became the largest provider of search results in the world with no competitors anywhere close to them their system fell apart.

Google really does not care about the webmaster. All they care about is that Adwords keeps printing money. As long as most people find what they want most the time that is all that matters to them.

Most of the time the battles for number one are between several sites that provide the same thing. People don't care that one site fell down as long as one of them is still up.

Also very few people are actually engaging in SEO compared to how many websites are out there. Most people don't know about SEO or gave up on it. I know a lot of people that just gave up on SEO. The ROI was just not there. This may be what Google is doing. Making it so hopeless that people just give up.

[JD_Toims]

What ogletree said.

---

The craziest thing to me about the entire situation is: by allowing negative SEO to be possible they don't "fix their results" or "make their system less game-able", they open up more ways for manipulation of the SERPs by webmasters/SEOs.

[Clay_More]

Your point SEEMS to suggest that I think these services are somehow good for ranking? In which case, you've completely missed (misrepresented?) my points.

I thought it was clear, but perhaps not.
Cheap links won't provide much benefit to a site. If cheap links won't benefit a site, then cheap links also won't provide a fatal blow to another site. The links will have a fairly equivalent value regardless if they are used in a positive or negative fashion.

Pretty easy and cheap for first hand testing, which is why I suggested it. I also would not believe any reviews of those kinds of services.

@JD
I was pretty much thinking of lower spots rather than 1-10.
I don't know that the negative SEO as defined here would be enough to hurt a 1-10 site in a competitive serp. Moving up from the 10 spot would probably need stronger positive links and decent user dynamics.
Probably SERP dependent and I'm not considering churn/n/burn.

Just a random thought about something I saw earlier today. I was looking at backlinks and saw a link I did not recognize. Page was PR3(place whatever value you want) with 2 outbound no-follow links, one of which was to my site.
I have no idea what value GG would place on that kind of link, but I think it's a decent mention. As I recall, I set location to a given area, then searched "mysite industry" "website".
Target was blogs allowing a website link in mysite industry.
Kinda like Scrapebox, but without the spam posting part. Blog owner got relevant UGC, I got a link of ? value.

[ColourOfSpring]

Cheap links won't provide much benefit to a site. If cheap links won't benefit a site, then cheap links also won't provide a fatal blow to another site. The links will have a fairly equivalent value regardless if they are used in a positive or negative fashion.

Pretty easy and cheap for first hand testing, which is why I suggested it. I also would not believe any reviews of those kinds of services.

So you think Google only punish valuable, but unnatural links? If you think this, there's a mountain of evidence to prove you wrong. Thousands of webmasters have had specific examples from Google that show how cheap links are deemed as being a problem for Google, and that they must be removed or disavowed. I've seen on a couple of sites that were hit by a penalty examples given by Google that I had to "clean up" (remove/disavow) - a forum profile link, a link from a splog, and a link from a directory that had immediately below it "deletet (sic) this link $20". No, I did not build any of these crappy links (why would I?) and these links were placed sometime in 2014.

I know a lot of people that just gave up on SEO. The ROI was just not there.

...and ironically, this makes negative SEO even easier. Most SME sites that don't engage in ANY kind of SEO will have the weakest of weak link profiles (scraped directories, "this site is worth $x" scraper sites, SEO report sites) - the easiest pins to knock over.

[Clay_More]

No, I said cheap links don't provide much value, whether attempted for positive or negative results.

If you seriously think a forum profile link, a link from a splog, and a link from a directory that had immediately below it "deletet (sic) this link $20 " should affect a site profile, then we are talking different issues. One decent link would far outweigh the noise you describe.

I earlier described a way to get a link. Do you believe no-follow links have absolutely no value? Do you believe the anchor text on the no-follow links needs to be keyword related?

Those are some of the questions I have asked. I rely on results from testing, that really is all that matters.

[ColourOfSpring]

If you seriously think a forum profile link, a link from a splog, and a link from a directory that had immediately below it "deletet (sic) this link $20 " should affect a site profile, then we are talking different issues. One decent link would far outweigh the noise you describe.

I did not say that 3 links alone (3 paltry links) would likely trigger a penalty. You must be aware that Google only give up to 3 example links when you get a penalty notice. It's not Google saying "hey, we found only these 3 links that we have trouble with" - they are saying "there are unnatural links pointing to your site, and here are 3 examples of what we are having trouble with". Anyway, perhaps you are now enlightened by the fact that Google can indeed be troubled by incredibly low value links.

I earlier described a way to get a link.

Yes, as you say..."from friends and family" - but I'm not sure why Google would be happy that such links are from "friends and family" - their guidelines state clearly that you should not win links that try to manipulate rankings.

Do you believe no-follow links have absolutely no value?

Technically, no-follow links have no value. They are not followed. If you are suggesting they DO have value, then this contradicts the purpose of no-follow.

Do you believe the anchor text on the no-follow links needs to be keyword related?

A strange question - but technically it shouldn't matter what the anchor text of a no-follow link is, as it's not followed by search engines. No-follow links are 100% neutral - neither good or bad. If you are suggesting that no-follow links are not neutral, then it gives even more power to spammers.

[Clay_More]

"Technically, no-follow links have no value."
Unless they are used for negative SEO where apparently they do have value.

I don't care for Google either, but there is some value to a consistent conceptual position.

[ColourOfSpring]

Unless they are used for negative SEO where apparently they do have value.

Again, the non sequitur. Nobody is talking about no-follow negative SEO here (which is a contradiction in terms). We are talking about cheap and easy to obtain do-follow links that can be built in their thousands for a few dollars.

At least this thread has been an education for some people:

1) Google do penalise low quality, do-follow links.
2) It's trivially easy to build low quality, do-follow links to any site you like, and there are indeed $5 services out there that build thousands of low quality, do-follow links to any site you want them to, thus creating point 1) for many vulnerable sites.

[turbocharged]

Cheap links won't provide much benefit to a site. If cheap links won't benefit a site, then cheap links also won't provide a fatal blow to another site.

In what I have seen, you are correct that no "fatal blow" was delivered with the negative SEO attacks. The sites were not deindexed, which is how I would describe a "fatal blow" to be. Regardless, I believe that your view of cheap links not harming a website to be inaccurate based on what I've seen.

I'm not saying it would be easy for nationally branded sites to be harmed, but the average small business website can be easily hurt because they really don't have that many links pointing to their sites in the first place.

Negative SEO damage is not just quantified in the loss in ranks, but the many hours small business owners spend (or pay someone else to do) in identifying "bad links," sending out link removal requests and using the disavow tool once they learn what has happened to them. Therefore, to measure damages by a loss in ranks alone fails to take into consideration the amount of effort small business owners exhaust in what many have found to be a futile recovery process.

Even if a negative SEO attack does not result in an immediate loss in ranks, the time/money wasted on cleaning up afterwards is evidence alone that such attacks do cause harm. And who's to say that a future penguin update or other algorithmic change would not count those remaining links as a negative factor against a website? For most negative SEO victims, just ignoring the attack and hoping for the best is not an option.

[SincerelySandy]

I don't know that the negative SEO as defined here would be enough to hurt a 1-10 site in a competitive serp. Moving up from the 10 spot would probably need stronger positive links and decent user dynamics.

The site I referred to earlier, whose rankings tanked within months of having dozens of spammy links pointed to it....
It was on the first page for almost all of it's targeted keywords, usually in the first 3 results.
It was also in the very, very competitive software industry.

If cheap links won't benefit a site, then cheap links also won't provide a fatal blow to another site.

Lets be a little more clear here. I'm not talking about "cheap links" and was under the impression that no one else in this thread was either. I'm talking about spammy links. You know, comment pages and the like that don't appear to be maintained, none of the links are on topic, and the links are all to low value sites selling Viagra, insurance, travel... you name it.
When you say "cheap links", I'm thinking cheap paid links like directories and other listing sites.

[fom2001uk]

Using the likes of Fiverr wouldn't be very stealthy tho, would it? Since payment is involved, it can be tracked back to you.

[ColourOfSpring]

Using the likes of Fiverr wouldn't be very stealthy tho, would it? Since payment is involved, it can be tracked back to you.

How on earth is a site owner going to know what service was used? If you own a site, and get 20,000 new links pointing to it, all you know is that someone's used an automated tool to build the links. Where do you start looking for the suspect? Even if you magically assumed that someone used Service Acme123 on fiverr.com, what are you going to do? Ask the owner of Service Acme123 to turn over his PayPal records to you? Good luck with that. But that's all hypothetical because you're simply never going to know how or who built the links.

[Clay_More]

I can log into webmaster tools and in "links to your site" find "no follow" links to my site. From this, I conclude Google does in fact crawl no follow links.

I described a test where a person could independently verify the impact of some quantity of no follow links. Those types of links from low cost providers are not do follow links in most cases. It's mostly
comment spam, call it what you like. From tests I have done, it is possible to impact serps with low quality links, just not to the degree some people seem to be implying it does.

I doubt this dead horse is going to go much further.

[JD_Toims]

snip please

[Clay_More]

snip please

There is an American saying about beating a dead horse. Meaning no matter what you try, progress is stalled.

Apologies if you found it offensive.

[JD_Toims]

There is an American saying about beating a dead horse.

There is, but no offense taken at all -- My horse ain't dead ;)

I branched this thread and answered one of your questions here: [webmasterworld.com...] -- Have a read.

[ColourOfSpring]

I can log into webmaster tools and in "links to your site" find "no follow" links to my site. From this, I conclude Google does in fact crawl no follow links.

Crawl and count (to influence rankings) are two very different things. I'd fully expect GWT to show you ALL links (regardless of each link's attributes).

[Mentat]

With no Penguin in sight, I have a huge problem with negative SEO.
My disavow file has now more than 14 000 domain: lines!

In the last 3 months I have problems with 3 domains, that have millions of subdomains and pages auto-generated and with dofollow links to me.
Not only this, but its tricky.
If you visit any page, you will SEE an CloudFlare error:

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

The fact is that it contains an iframe with a lot of links!

[i.imgur.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

I'd fully expect GWT to show you ALL links (regardless of each link's attributes).

Yep. That's how it works. It would be nice if nofollowed links were identified as such in WMT, though.

[ColourOfSpring]

My disavow file has now more than 14 000 domain: lines!

I'm half joking here, but it would be easier to simply say what links you avow, rather than disavow (if Google worked that way). 99.99% of the web is utter junk - why should we have to disavow ourselves from it all the time?

[Mentat]

Good point CorourOfSpring, but my site was big and old + a lot of scrappers used our RSS for feeds. This did not create problems until Penguin...

[micklearn]

Yep. That's how it works. It would be nice if nofollowed links were identified as such in WMT, though.

Agreed. As well as identifying links that don't even/no longer exist but are listed in WMT.

[ogletree]

The best kind of SEO is to have a great company that a lot of people really like. Do that and you will be number one. That does not always work. Some areas of Google there is no such thing as natural links. You can be the number one very best in the business you are in and everybody knows who you are but you can have almost no links because that industry just does not attract links. People that like it don't link to it and people that give links don't care about it. I have seen this in some legal industries. Google assumes that if you’re not a big deal on the Internet your nothing. Most the time this is true but not always. You can be the most famous person for your keyword and still not rank for it. You can even have the top ten sites link to you saying you are the best and still not rank.

You can have a million people know who you are and think you’re the best in your business but if they don't own websites you’re nothing to Google.

Google is broken. They claim they want you to have a clean link profile but really there is no such thing anymore. The internet is a huge smelly mountain of junk and everything in it stinks. Google can only show you the top ten sites that they think stink the least. Only problem is it is very easy for somebody wearing Prada shoes to step in something awful and it is very easy for somebody wearing fake Prada’s to pass up the nicer shoes. They look at the Internet like somebody would look at a hotel room with a black light a microscope and a germ test kit. I’m surprised they list anything the way they look at sites. Not one site could really pass their current tests.

I have seen results that cost $10 a click in adwords start with 3 sites that are paid directories and then the next result is a company that only mentions the keyword on an internal page where they are basically saying “oh yeah and we do this too but we mostly do something else”. The number one company that has the exact 2 word phrase as the domain name and is the only company that specializes in this type of work and handles more business in this area than any other business by a large margin is nowhere to be found.

[ColourOfSpring]

Great points Ogletree. Many small to medium sized businesses have been around for decades, have business premises, employ people, have a history of providing a good service - all these things Google do not know about, and cannot know about. Instead, they spider the company's "brochure" (their website) and judge how popular and useful their brochure is, not their service. The counterargument is that Google simply cannot measure offline signals because it would involve an impractical manual review of a company. I think there's certainly room for a pay-for-review service by Google that investigate each business. Spammers / fly-by-night operators wouldn't waste $200-$400 (or whatever it will be) on such a service knowing they'll get a bad review - good companies will queue up for such a review. I doubt it will happen though.