[andreitp1]

Got curious and decided to go through their SEO.

- First off, according to Ahrefs, their dofollow / nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1, which is a huge red flag right away. A more natural ratio would be in the neighborhood of 1:2 so we are talking 20x less. But hey, maybe it's the niche that naturally attracts a ton of dofollow links - let's move on

- Looking at another of the main spam indicators, anchor text, most of them are just single keywords, like "ashwagandha", which point to the page optimized to rank for that exact generic search. The entire website is targeting single-term searches, which are notoriously hard to rank for and attract a lot of spam websites. This falls into anchor text over-optimization. They have 210 referring pages linking to their curcumin page with the exact anchor text "curcumin", same with "catechins", "creatine", "caffeine", "vitamin d" and the list goes on for all the keywords they are trying to rank for. This is not just unusual, it's literally impossible for it to just happen naturally. This has the Penguin penalty written all over it. Moving on...

- Their backlinks are for sure interesting. Among their top backlinks, we have pages such as: https://www.herbalsupplementreview.com/retro-lean-forskolin/ - with a URL rating of 46 for a website with zero traffic. In SEO terms these are called “PBN links”. Not that unusual for the health niche, but definitely not white hat. Here’s another one with the same identical metrics as the previous one (this time, it’s a homepage link), also from a dubious website with zero traffic: https://best-testosteronebooster.com/.

All of these with exact match anchor texts leading to their corresponding Examine.com pages.

- Mind you, I’m not saying that they don’t have great editorial content, and I’m not sure who helped them with their SEO, but I’m not the least bit surprised that Google might have penalized them multiple times for several reasons. There's probably more stuff but this is what I was able to find with a quick analysis.

[AhmedF]

Let me be clear - we have never bought a single link.

We get direct links similar to what wikipedia does - aka direct to a supplement.

For example, creatine: https://examine.com/supplements/creatine/

You will not find a more in-depth page on creatine anywhere on the net.

https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-... - here's a simple example of direct links.

We're also considered the authoritative site, which is why so many sites (including spammers, sigh) link to us.

[tgtweak]

Disavow the bad backlinks via webmaster console, you'll notice a huge penalty for letting these bad sites link to you without disavowing them. It looks like (to Google) you're buying backlinks, and in this case ones on sites that are slammed by the latest updates. Try this on a few of the worst offenders and you'll see a noticable difference.

In your space you have the most aggressive blackhat seo actors (supplements) looking at you as the bad guy for exposing them, I wouldn't be surprised if you discover a ton of bad backlinks from domains that have a terrible reputation. Source: lost over 100,000 unique Google visits per day because of a malicious competitor putting unsolicited backlinks to our domain without our knowing and it took months before it came back.

[AhmedF]

Ugh - I did disavow for the first time ever.

> lost over 100,000

Sucks. You'd think G would be smart enough to ignore, not penalize.

Negative SEO shit has been going on for over a decade now...

[tgtweak]

They invented disavow for this exact reason. Backlink bombing was a thing.

Let me know the progress, I'm fairly certain this will help you out big time, unfortunately it's a bit of legwork and it takes time to recover.

Even if somebody inside Google wanted to fix your problem they're not able to respond on search ranking algorithms or exceptions. I heard from a Google search engineer that other than a curated blacklist (with many controls in place) they have removed the ability to influence the rankings (positively or negatively) with human intervention. This is due to "plausible deniability" over them playing god with search rankings.

Maybe someone with some authority will see this and review a penalty - albeit without responding to you - but usually this will come back in a few months if the underlying cause isn't resolved.

Best of luck.

[H8crilA]

I mean, as harsh as it sounds, manually rescuing a single website (even if you're 99.99% sure there's no black hat involved) is not worth leaving a trail showing a potential compromise of search quality. It is not nice but it kind of has to be this way - that they don't help individual websites.

[tomp]

> their dofollow / nofollow ratio is a staggering 10:1,

Wouldn't this simply be a result of them having tons of (presumably trustworthy) references?

> They have 210 referring pages linking to their curcumin page with the exact anchor text "curcumin"

What would a better anchor text be? It seems to me to be very informative ("what is curcumin? maybe I'll find out by clicking a link that says 'curcumin'...").

I'm no SEO-er, but these would seem to me to be normal for a "reference-style" website. I wonder how Wikipedia would score according to these metrics...

[_ptgt]

This completely misses the point of a search engine. The ability to game SEO has nothing to with relevance or content quality.

If a random supplement information website's most lucrative monetization path would be to game SEO instead of doing what they're nominally supposed to do (i.e. provide quality content), the problem doesn't lie with the the content owner but rather with the search engine and the incentives it promotes.

[habitue]

I think the point is that they apparently have spent a bunch of time on SEO, and it's backfiring.

[Buge]

You're arguing search engines should disincentivize gaming SEO? That seems to be exactly what Google has done here.

[theartfuldodger]

When creating bullshit backlink sites for whatever purposes, usually not for actual reading by users, it is a common tactic to link out to non-commercial sites to show authenticity and mask the true backlink/spam purposes of the site.

This has been theorized as being ond of the original reasons wikipedia received heavy backlinks.

It is not necessarily the fault of an SEO strategy of the linked site.

Disavowing is not a worthwhile practice ( at least in recent years)

Herbal supplement review is not a PBN as it is so heavily filled with affiliate links that the backlinks would have no value to any who purchase such things. So in this case, examine.com is being used as the attempt to seem authentic.

The single term.keywords is problematic and likely unavoidably proof that the backlink profile is very manipulated

I scanned in Moz and although I dont agree with the "why" ( nofollow links are uncommon in traditional small websites and blogs, most don't even know what they are, so your ratio is meaningless to me) the anchor keywords could never be accidental, this is very much intentional.

I don't know what previous designs looked like ..but basic opportunities in on page seo are ignored or automated, top level architecture is weak, the index conventions by letter is wasteful/missed opportunity.

Although not a ranking factor ... accessibility is abysmal

In short, there is so much wrong with the document structure, general architecture and even title conventions.. i dont even think looking into backlink profile is necessary yet.

The article mentions reviews by SEO's but doesn't mention whether they paid anyone to point out the obvious flaws.

Content seems strong to me, I dig into the Rogan and Ferris mentioned supplements regularly, this content is better cited than most I run into and certainly better than bb.com / roid world forums that fill this space. So, it's a shame.

Looks like a ton of poor architecture and document structure decisions to me.

[nameismypw]

This post is a good example of why SEO is such a joke. Worse than a joke, actually, because it's actively harmful.

If your search algorithm is penalizing Examine.com, that's a bug in your algorithm. It's not up to websites to jump through Google's hoops. Authors only ought to be concerned with authoring good content.

[whalabi]

> It's not up to websites to jump through Google's hoops.

It shouldn't be, but it definitely is

[quickthrower2]

If you can knock a site out of Google with bad backlinks, then you could do that to your competitors as a sort of anti-SEO.

[charrondev]

It’s definitely a thing https://ahrefs.com/blog/negative-seo/

[quickthrower2]

Thanks for that.

It does say "It’s believed that with Penguin 4.0 Google has transitioned back to devaluing (or ignoring) spammy links, rather than penalising for them"

My working model is Google is working hard to make search relevant, as that's their bread and butter. If you do a Google search and you get spammy sites, you stop using Google, and they lose money.

Black hats will always be one step ahead, and will find very technical ways to beat Google in the short to medium term, and sometimes forever.

However negative seo is going to be such a common attack vector, especially against unsophisticated webmasters (which ironically might be the people with the most useful information, the people who Google DO want to show). So Google is going to consider this a major bug if such sites are getting attacked like this.

Ignoring but not penalising spammy links is the best thing for Google to do.