[austenallred]

"The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well."

LOL.

I know a half dozen guys who build millions of automated links every day. They say an easy term and they're in the top 5 results after 5 days, a hard term (a variety of diet pills, etc.) and it takes them a month. They get manually banned from time to time, but they just pull another URL from their pool and start over.

It's gotten more sophisticated and therefore is more difficult, but to say spam doesn't work is laughable to anyone who is or knows anyone in the blackhat SEO "industry."

[Matt_Cutts]

Hey Austen, if you'd be interested in sharing any specifics (companies, keywords, people, etc.) regarding people spamming by leaving millions of links gumming up the web, my team would be happy to investigate in more detail.

[Matsta]

Hahaha do you seriously think he's gonna give up the keywords these guys are making money off.

Spamming sites still worked pre-hummingbird and infact it works even better now.

Even Negative SEO works just as well. Have a competitor you don't like? Give him 100k blog comments with "Buy Viagra" and suddenly he will be de indexed in 3 months or less.

I think half the reason she quit is that SEO is so damn unpredictable now. You can make a spammy site and might rank or might get de-indexed. But at the same time you can make a 100% whitehat site and it probably won't even rank and can get just as easily de-indexed as a blackhat spam site.

You need to read up on BlackHatWorld a bit more Mr Cutts.

[Matt_Cutts]

Hey Matt G, I appreciate the suggestion but I already read quite a bit of BHW.

P.S. I enjoyed reading about that Twitter stuff from 2-3 years ago.

[bapbap]

One of my sites was a victim of the negative SEO trick, I kept getting warnings from Google (Site violates Google's quality guidelines) that there were links to my site that violated their guidelines.

It didn't matter what I said in my reconsideration request to explain I had no knowledge or control over it (I've no interest in spammy link sharing or buying links), I kept getting similar canned responses.

I gave up in the end.

[kamisendu]

In fact, there are many spamming sites in non-English searches. If you like these info,I can mail you some.

[throwaway9848]

That's the joke.

[austenallred]

Email me - email address in HN profile

[PilateDeGuerre]

No one likes a snitch.

[cmyr]

No one likes spammers.

[Axsuul]

Hate the game, not the player.

[swang]

No I think in this case: Fuck Spammers.

[GrinningFool]

Speak for yourself. Snitches on spammers hold a special place in my heart.

[USblfs-1980]

I work a lot in the EU markets (half German). Here some of the biggest spammers I know

casamundo.de + .nl - auto generating texts and internal, irrelevant links. Outranks every player.

independer.nl/autoverzekering/merken/opel.aspx - generating doorway pages with minimal / none added value

veiligonlinegeldlenen.nl - just check their back link profile and site, and you know enough

meinestadt.de/berlin/ - great start, until you find stuff they really rank on:

meinestadt.de/berlin/dsl - no value add

And many, many more. The German market is competitive but with smart spamming and automated content generation, you can outrank anyone.

[dchuk]

Surely this is something trivial to identify internally for you guys?

[Matt_Cutts]

We're pretty good at dissecting various techniques, spam networks, etc. But I always like to hear feedback from different places to see how we're doing, uncover new pockets of spam, etc.

[gazkey]

I must admit, I always wondered how this network got away with churning burning for past few years (hdwallpapers3d.com, hdwallpapersdj.com, hdwallpapersinn.com, hdwallpapersuk.com, hdwallpapersfan.com, hdwallpaperszon.com, celebritywallpapers3d.com, hdwallpapersonly.com)

Always come up, they offer little value, and are often no more than a few months old, and all made for adsense pages of content ripped from other places. Moment you take one down like you did with hdwallpaperarena.com they just redirected it to hdwallpapersinn.com (which even has the same logo up still).

I just found it a bit of an an odd one given some tactics they apply are outlawed yet they seem to get by, I always see these sites crop up.

[lzr]

Hi, Matt, If scraped content ranked high is considered a spam, try search for 'atx pinout' (without quotes). The first image result is img.lehaleha.com/medium/17/atx%20smps%20circuit%20diagram17.jpg which is placed on the page circuitdiagramupdate.blogspot.com/2013/08/atx-smps-circuit-diagram.html . You can see in lower right corner of this image url smpspowersupply.com - that's where they scraped this image. Ironically, the original image (shown in smpspowersupply.com/connectors-pinouts.html ) is seen nowhere in google search results.

[SEOBSDetector]

Here's one that is a little under the radar. The Young Entrepreneur's Council theyec.org posts guest blog articles on well known sites like Forbes, Inc, B2C. Those articles are full of "expert" quotes from members of the YEC with paid memberships - all with links to their sites of course. You'll see the same sites linked to in most of these mostly useless articles. You won't be seeing any quotes or links from people who haven't paid the YEC. Nice little link exchange to get links from really prominent sites.

[qwidjib0]

Practicing "SEO" of 10+ years here.

Yes, that's black hat SEO. It's very different from the Search Engine Land world. The idea is burn/rinse/repeat of sketchy affiliate sites, people make a very good living off it. Even still. Matt Cutts can surely find all he needs to know about that world on Black Hat World, I don't think that these guys are keeping much from them. But I also don't think it's easy for them to fix without potentially having negative consequences for the rest of the world.

The flip-side of this is the "white hat SEO" world. I don't know about Jill's own practices, but the conference/publication world with which she's a part of is frequented by people like Matt Cutts. And I think she hits the nail on the head for that: it's driven by content/PR now. There is still a place for on-page SEO for a corporate site if you're strong with the technical stuff (for example, schema.org type stuff is just getting off the ground with the Google Knowledge Graph). But it's not the sexy / easy to sell fast salvation that it once was.

[hsod]

> "The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well."

> It's gotten more sophisticated and therefore is more difficult

sounds like you agree

[PilateDeGuerre]

No necessarily. Just because it may be more difficult to achieve doesn't mean it is less effective. The process is more specialized now surely and yet the niche remains. We know that when supply is constrained the price rises. So it may now be even more profitable for fewer players.

[toomuchtodo]

Google Engineers > "SEO" Monkeys

Note: I mean no slight to the folks who provide a genuine optimization service, just those who are essentially scammers.