[trevin]

This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site).

Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name?

I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts (RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO.

Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner has any idea.

1: https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/420165509296844800 2: http://www.seobook.com/spam-big-or-die

[puranjay]

Negative SEO is a very real thing. You can buy links off black hat forums that are specifically advertised to help knock off your competition.

It's the same with other social media as well. Want to get one of your competitor's fledgling Facebook pages banned? A service will spam out the page link in FB comments for a few dollars. Then when the FB mods come calling, the onus of proving innocence becomes your responsibility.

The ease with which you can spam and hack your competitors online is becoming a little frightening.

[danielweber]

It was one of the first casualties of the anti-spam wars. Completely uninvolved people found themselves on the wrong end of this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job

[bradleyjg]

> Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"?

There was a cheesy TV show several years back about a group of con artists, I don't remember the name but they had a sort of motto that applies here: "you can't con an honest man."

What exactly is our poor innocent small business owner trying to do by hiring a cheap SEO firm? He's trying to manipulate the google rankings in his favor, and away from what's objectively best for the searchers. Maybe he doesn't know google has rules about or how exactly the SEO firm is going to go about, but he's not an innocent victim.

[leephillips]

Well, there is the classic W.C. Fields movie, "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man". It opens with a con where a cashier pretends to be distracted and acts like he is overcounting the change for a customer, who grabs the money and runs. But the ruse is to cover up the fact that the cashier actually short-changed the customer, who, if he had tried to protect the cashier from giving him too much change, would not have been cheated.