[jacquesm]

I'm so happy google did this. For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine.

Let me explain: When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com I was trying to achieve something positive. I did not realize how infested geocities had become with spammers, linkfarms and other trash.

Probably at least a few million of the accounts were either compromised or somehow tricked into placing low value links on their pages at the behest of SEO types that were engaging in 'scalable link building'. Comment spam and so on.

Very annoying. And I really did not know what to do about this, it felt wrong that I'd be contributing to these businesses somehow even in a peripheral way.

And then google decided to penalize 'spammy links'. So the tables are turned. Not a day passes without some whiny email from some SEO character that is trying to clean up after their past misdeeds. They try to automate this of course (imagine that their trickery would no longer scale) so they spam tons of automated emails to webmasters threatening to use the google disavow tool because they have been penalized.

So the tables are turned, for a change. Suddenly all those trashy links are degrading rather than enhancing the stature of these companies and their ill motivated SEO brethern.

So, I hope this stays, as far as I'm concerned google can shut down the disavow tool and those that lived by the sword should die by the sword. It's like an 'own goal' by the bad element in the SEO community.

At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). Especially since if a competitor successfully uses google as an offensive weapon that they can remain unidentified or undetected. (Which makes me wonder about the motives of the OP not to disclose who this was, it would be a lot easier to verify the story, and any subsequent retaliation could be dealt with in the same manner.)

But overall this spammy links penalty is a good development.

The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take manual action to remove the spam that was placed in an automated way by the perps in the past, that's a really bad balance there.

I'm completely not impressed by these threats for reocities.com I only care that the content is online. I guess I could replace all the outbound links by 'nofollows' but that would hurt a lot of good sites as well and I really hope that google can tell the difference between 'good' and 'bad' links in this respect. (If they can't that would be a huge problem)

edit: the voting on this comment is interesting, 1->+9->+1->+9->+5

Never had a comment oscillate like that.

[antjanus]

I'd like to look at it in another way. I've a small blog, one that I love running, it makes barely any money, but for a long time ranked for some pretty good keywords.

Anyways, a few of my articles blew up on hackernews, reddit, even on twitter (with smashing magazine tweeting it out), as a result, everyone and their grandma linked back to my articles when they discussed the topic it targeted.

What happened then? I looked at my link profile and I've a few thousand "dangerous looking" backlinks. All from people that had low-ranking blogs or 0 ranking blogs, or that used Tumblr's share feature (which blogged a link and an excerpt) to "bookmark" my site. And some from people that FULLY reblogged my site without permission. Meaning that they took the entire article. They weren't shady either, they had a big banner that said: "I repost articles for my own use to read in case the site goes down" or something to that effect with, obviously, a link back to my site as a source.

What happened? Penguin, Panda, and all the other animals killed most of these sites. Even considered some of them spam.

Now, I have a "dirty" link profile through no fault of my own, using no "shady" tactics.

This just pisses me off to no ends. I never "link built" anything, the links just happened naturally. Yet, I get penalized for it. It's fucking shitty. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

[leephillips]

Imagine how much worse you'd feel if you found out that someone who doesn't like you did this to you deliberately.

Google makes this too easy. Through ill-considered changes to their algorithms they've provided a new weapon for the unscrupulous.

I've noticed a similar thing with my own personal site. For years it was on Google's front page for a bunch of things (niche topics that wouldn't translate into money). So was my name, which really surprised me. Lately, as it's gotten more links to it from higher profile sources, including some national magazine sites, it's rapidly fallen back in Google's listings.

[lifeisstillgood]

I don't fully understand this. How did you look at your link profile? Is this a blessed google thing ? And how do you know your drop in rankings is down to this back link issue - what if other people have written better stuff (apologies !)

[antjanus]

There are several tools out there which scan your backlink profile and give you a report on your backlinks. They usually scan the sites and give you a "danger" rating for those sites. I can't remember the name of the tool I used but I had nearly 20K links in the "danger" rating. Half of them were super-spammy sites that simply repost what you already posted, the other half was a mix of bloggers (good and bad).

Usually you can tell that it's because of that issue when a major penguin update goes out, and your rank suddenly drops. To confirm it, you'd disavow the bad links (so, the link farms that link back to you, the reposters, reblogers, spammy affiliate sites etc.) and see how it affects your ranking and exposure.

It worked VERY well for me once everything was said and done.

[Isofarro]

"I never "link built" anything, the links just happened naturally"

Great. that's what's supposed to happen, links accumulate naturally. (I'm deliberately ignoring the inconsistencies in your story, BTW ;-)

"Yet, I get penalized for it. It's fucking shitty"

How are you being penalised? Did you get a warning of bad links in your Google Webmaster dashboard? If not, how do you know?

Links accumulate, and some disappear over time. That's natural on the web. If Google taking out a bunch of low quality sites affects your own site, that only means the value of your site is significantly positively affected by these sites, so your site was over-ranked. Now it's placed closer to where it should be.

Being linked to by big traffic sources also brings attention from less known sources - that's quite normal.

[jacquesm]

Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is?

If someone copies your content, go after them, sue them if you have to and out them. Make sure that they realize that if they copy your content that it will hurt.

I have absolutely no idea what if any backlinks I have to my blog, nor could I care less about it. People will read it, or maybe they won't, like yours it id non-commercial, a way for me to practice my writing and to sometimes tell stories and share those with others. It does not make me money and it costs me time. What google makes of it is not my problem.

I would not think of paying someone to increase the visibility and it took many years to get to any kind of exposure at all.

[vectorpush]

Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is?

Well, besides the fact that it's his prerogative to care about his blog's search ranking, I think the implications are pretty obvious; he's suggesting that if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone, including someone who does have a commercial interest.

[antjanus]

That's one thing another thing is that just because my blog is non-commercial doesn't mean it shouldn't rank. I monetized it recently and would like to continue making some cash off it (to cover costs and as an incentive and excuse to continue doing this). On top of that, I like to write, the more people read my shit, the more I'm excited to write.

What sucks about this entire dilemma is that we're all looking at "lost revenue", no one is looking at "quality content going down the drain". Good search results disappear and are replaced by someone who has a ton of cash backing them whose content is meant to convert and monetize, make cash off the user and nothing else.

At least in my case, I want people to primarily read my stuff.

And it seems ridiculous to me that someone would say, "Who cares if people read your blog, it's not as if you're making any money off it!"

Can you imagine some of the most popular devs that have non-monetized blogs all of a sudden disappearing from google search with their insights and answers? Among others, there's Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman both of whom rank well but have non-monetized sites.

[jacquesm]

Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it.

What would do it is: interesting articles, a userbase that likes what you write and passes it to their friends, a reputation for quality and useful articles, people linking to you because they found your content useful, engaging you audience and so on.

In contrast with that (which takes a long time to build up, that I will readily admit) google traffic seems so fickle.

[spankalee]

As a Google _user_ I care a lot about this issue. A lot of the technical topics and questions I search for are answered best by blog posts from people who've solved the same issue, or are an authority. I don't want them thrown out with the spam, and I don't want all such content to have to be hosted on sites like Stack Overflow to be findable.

[jshen]

This is a rather arrogant comment. Why assume that everyone fits the same niche as you? I once ran a site/blog where I blogged about a particular disease that I have and all of the research I did as I tried to understand it. This means that my content was typically found by people who have just come down with this disease and turn to google to search for information. I did not have a relationship with these readers prior to them getting this disease.

[moistgorilla]

When I search for an article on some new tech or a tutorial for some library or such I almost always get a few blogs with good content. Many of those blogs have books written by the owners which they advertise on the subject they blog about. I buy those sometimes. Basically, google is a good source of traffic for blogs.

[watwut]

"Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it."

The biggest source of traffic on my blog is google. Links from elsewhere cause spikes at bests, but that is it. Search engine is what drives clicks.

[squeaky-clean]

I've found dozens of good blogs through Google. You've never had a problem that you googled and found a solution on someone's blog before?

[tobltobs]

Are you trolling?

[jacquesm]

I miss the bit where we have a right to traffic. That's maybe naive, but just like I don't expect customers to beat their way to my door through some act of magic I don't expect visitors to come to my website either. If I want them there I have to go and engage them. That's marketing, building customer relationships and so on. Hard work, and definitely not easy money but it is very hard to assail that from the position of a competitor or even Google.

Of course it could happen to anybody. That is the one reason why you should never ever run a business that is dependent on a single source for customers. If you do that you don't have a business at all, just an extension of the ecosystem owned by someone else at whose whim you live or die.

[jshen]

I'm really shocked by your naive arrogance in this thread. You can't see beyond your own niche and use case. There is an enormous space of good content where the best method of finding that content is searching the internet, not having a previous relationship with a client/customer. In an earlier comment I gave one of many examples, medical conditions that people don't care about until they get it, and at that point they turn to google to search for information.

Google is effectively a monopoly on this front, and at some level should have an obligation to the common good.

[jacquesm]

The problem here is not that 'good content' is not going to be found, it seems to be that in spaces where there is a ton of competition that the competitors are all in some kind of state where they all feel they and they alone have a right to be the ones to engage with the searchers on topic 'x'.

I highly doubt that in the use-case that you envision (which is indeed not one that I had in mind when reading the comment above) where you are providing to the point information about something you care about you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine.

Remember how altavista was spammed to death with on-page trickery and google came and it all suddenly was much better. At the time we did not realize that this would come at the price of the destruction of what made the web great, the links that would lead you from one place to another.

The fact that google is a monopoly is our collective problem, not google's, it's only a monopoly because we let them and because - for now - they are still the best way to get to relevant content.

The thing that could happen in your use-case is that someone would end up finding their information somewhere else or that they would engage with someone else. The only case where there would be a loss to them (your hypothetical visitor) is if they would not engage with anybody at all. But that can't really be true since we're theorizing here from the point of view where there is a glut of relevant content competing for a limited number of slots and then regardless of what the criteria are some of those sites will simply miss out on potential visitors.

The only real worry I have here is that the users would not find any relevant content or places to engage at all. And that's far from being proven.

Google does not have an obligation to the common good other than an ethical and a moral one, a real obligation is a legal one and I - in spite of being fairly harshly critical of google on lots of fronts - have no doubt that if they could solve the spam problem in an effective way would not need any prodding at all to go and do that immediately.

Demanding they do better is tantamount to dictating that an advance in technology be made, maybe the problem is harder than it seems?

[vectorpush]

I get what you're saying, but as far as business goes, it's just not very pragmatic to ignore the monumental impact that google can have on your hits/conversions. Your competitors certainly aren't ignoring it.

[ameister14]

I disagree with your second statement. If I run a gas station along a heavily trafficked street, is that a mistake? I have one source of customer; people aren't going to be loyal to my services enough to drive for them. If the traffic on the street lessens, I can lose business.

It doesn't mean it's a bad idea to buy or build the gas station there.

[jacquesm]

Yes, if the traffic on the street lessens then you will lose (some) business. But where is the unfairness in that? You don't actually have a right to business.

And if people are not loyal that's a serious problem with either the line of business you are in or your relationship with your customer.

[chrismcb]

It isn't just about the web site owner and their traffic... It is also about you. Don't you want Google to give you good results? Wouldn't you be unhappy if the best result got hidden on page 50 because someone link spammed them?

[mfjordvald]

As someone with a blog, the size of my audience matters a lot, knowing I actually have people reading what I put out there matters a lot. Having people interact with my content or tell me it helped them sure does motivate me as well.

If I lost my search engine traffic that'd account for half of my daily traffic. (only around 500-600 people so not huge) If that happened that'd be pretty demotivating.

[jacquesm]

> If that happened that'd be pretty demotivating.

Ok, that's a good reason.

But when you started blogging you did not have any visitors at all, you must have done it for some other reason.

And when you have 1200 visitors (say a year from now) per day and you lose half your visitors per day (because they are search engine traffic) and you're back to 600 you could still argue that you lost your motivation.

How many visitors come to your site is just a number. What you get out of the engagement is the key imo, and in that sense 50 people that you engage with are worth 500 that just visit and look at what you write.

[graeme]

>But when you started blogging you did not have any visitors at all, you must have done it for some other reason.

Or maybe they expected that if they blogged, they would get visitors? It's pretty well known that if you put good stuff on the internet, people will find it, including through google.

>And when you have 1200 visitors (say a year from now) per day and you lose half your visitors per day (because they are search engine traffic) and you're back to 600 you could still argue that you lost your motivation.

Yes, it's always true that it hurts to lose a source of traffic. I don't follow your point.

>How many visitors come to your site is just a number. What you get out of th engagement is the key imo, and in that sense 50 people that you engage with are worth 500 that just visit and look at what you write.

This is true, but you seem to be assuming that google visitors are less engaged. Why? My time on site is highest for organic search traffic.

[ProAm]

| Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is?

Because networking is everything in life. Maintaining a good reputation, providing valuable information may not pay off immediately today, but you never know what you'll need tomorrow. If you are penalized today, you have no chance at tomorrow.

[jacquesm]

But google traffic is not networking. And a link profile is not networking either, that's just a bunch of bits.

Networking is meeting and engaging people.

[ProAm]

You can certainly build a network by meeting people via your blog content. If they can't find it, you'll never engage with those people.

[DontBeADick]

Are you really trying to pretend that you don't care if people read your blog even though you link to it here all the time?

If there were an olympic event for mental gymnastics, you'd be dominating right now.

[jacquesm]

> Are you really trying to pretend that you don't care if people read your blog even though you link to it here all the time?

I checked to see if you have a point here, I submitted exactly one link out of the last 30 or so to my own site, the rest have been posted by others. If we go back 60 links that's approximately 300 days and there are still only 2 links, and both of these were in response to HN content, either articles or comment threads.

Suggest you re-read my original comment and then take your own nick as advice.

[DontBeADick]

Regardless of how many links you've posted (it's also in your profile), the point still stands: You want people to read your blog. The simple fact that you have a public blog on the internet demonstrates that, even if you never posted a link to it.

If you truly don't care about "what Google makes of it", why not block Google with your robots.txt file?

I'll tell you why: Because you do care, but you're pretending not to for the sake of arguing with a bunch of people on the internet. And the position you've taken in that argument appears to be based largely on spite rather than reason.

We get it, you don't like SEOs, but these changes clearly hurt innocent people who know little or nothing about SEO.

[jacquesm]

Not caring about google includes not caring about whether they do or do not send traffic to my site. As you are no doubt aware because you have done so much work to research this there is no advertising on the blog. If people find it through google I'm perfectly ok with that. But I won't bend over backwards to make sure more people will find it, nor will I take action to ensure less people will find it.

The rest of your comment seems to presume you know me better than I know myself so I'll leave that without a reply, but I'm happy that we have established that your original comment was a load of nonsense.

[Isofarro]

"We get it, you don't like SEOs, but these changes clearly hurt innocent people who know little or nothing about SEO."

These changes are clearly hurting SEOers who practice massive link building regardless of quality, too. That is a good thing.

[cosmie]

  > At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves).

That was the point being made - people are being targeted by their competitors, using the negative penalty from link farms to devalue competitor's sites. And Google can't tell the difference. You're right in that it's SEOs doing what they've always done, it just now has a penalty attached which gives unscrupulous ones a new service to offer and good SEO's a link-removal service.

  > The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take manual action to remove the spam that was placed in an automated way by the perps in the past, that's a really bad balance there.

While it may be a manual action on Google's part, it's quickly becoming automated[1].

[1] http://www.removeem.com/

[jacquesm]

Yes, I know that is the point being made. But that's a very small bit of fall-out from a huge improvement.

OP is right in fact but this is a rarity, overall google search results improved and the fact that the whole SEO world is in panic about this (proof in my inbox) is fantastic news. That it can be used for bad purposes is obvious, those that were gaming before will game this just as much. But rather than being in denial about negative SEO google should simply come clean about the numbers, any kind of classification system has false positives, a categoric denial is simply something you should not believe.

And in spite of that Google should stay the course, they're not a court and nobody has an innate right to an x% of search traffic. If that were the case we could replace google with a link lottery.

[cosmie]

Oh definitely! I like the fact that my top results aren't always dominated by eHow, Wikipedia, WikiAnswers, and Yahoo Answers now.

It's the denial about false positives that is frustrating. If you're going to build in logic to penalize link farming, then one would hope you'd make an attempt at identifying malicious link schemes. By categorically denying the possibility even exists, it leaves most people assuming such an attempt hasn't been made.

[adriand]

Why can't Google just apply a different algorithm to link farms that have appeared recently? Presumably anything relatively recent is either someone who doesn't know about the changes to the algorithm that penalize link farms, or is engaging in negative SEO.

[lifeisstillgood]

That's so obvious now you mention it :-) Any spammy link created now should simply be discarded, it either is an attack or it is a fool. Either way ignore

[rfergie]

That means that, as a site owner, I would be free to engage in spam SEO.

If it works, then I get rankings and traffic.

If it doesn't then there is no harm to me and I can go try some new tactic

[jacquesm]

Yes, exactly. With the cut-off date being the panda roll-out.

[bjterry]

It's not a question of a false positive rate in this case, because the current false positive rate relies on the current baseline level of malicious actors. If they admit that there are false positives, then that will cause more malicious actions, which will increase the false positive rate. It's actually not clear right now whether google even tries to tell the difference between someone using spammy link building for themselves vs. someone using spammy link-building on a competitor. I don't even know where you'd begin on trying to figure out the difference, since you would never have any data to calibrate to.

[jacquesm]

But of course there are false positives. It's a classifier, no classifier that is automated on something as fluid as relevancy for a particular user will be 100% spot on all the time.

Precision and recall can't be 100% accurate given a large enough set of inputs. That would be magic. You can try to do better, of course. But it will never be perfect and you'll never make everybody happy. False positives are a given. Matt was wrong when he said that, he pretty much had to be wrong due to the nature of the problem.

That he stuck to his guns is imo a mistake, that google can be manipulated into dropping sites from their rankings at the behest of others is a serious problem. Such unscrupulous behaviour should be punished, but then you get yet another layer of complexity in the arms race.

Basically you can read this whole saga as Google having to come to terms with the fact that even though they were a cut above altavista they too will have problems that no algorithm will solve.

Admitting that is probably above Matt's paygrade.

[Isofarro]

"That he stuck to his guns is imo a mistake, that google can be manipulated into dropping sites from their rankings at the behest of others is a serious problem."

There are two main ways of dealing with issues:

* Prevent them from happening

* Mitigate the risk so the fallout is minimised if it does happen

Because there are flaws in the first way doesn't mean the second hasn't been explored or carried out.

We mitigate risk all the time. Seat-belts, looking both ways before crossing the street, insurance. The entire banking system.

So you get hit with a manual penalty for spammy links. Deal with it. Document it in great detail, publish it, share it with Google. Then SEOers will have both the data they need and a Google rep to talk to. Plus, if it is as terrifying as SEOers keep telling us it is, the news headline boost alone will make up for the link profile damage.

I think I know why SEOers are in an uproar about this: they'll have to collaborate with Google on a new level of openness. Effectively, recipients of negative SEO attacks, who then notify Google, will also have a nice shiny Google light shone on their SEO tactics leading up to the negative SEO attack. And I guess almost all SEOers have done something they are not entirely proud of, or wish to be forthcoming about. It's the fear of being seen as something other than completely white-hat.

The ways to avoid reaching that uncomfortable point is:

* Hope their fellow SEOers don't hit them first with a negative SEO attack

* Hope Google reverses this decision, so they don't have to venture down that road.

It's a bit like that Simsons sketch where the whole family are in a shock therapy session:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP4INdt_-fk

The SEO fear is one of their fellow SEOers pressing the button.

Hopefully it will make them more forthcoming in cleaning up their industry. A bit of public naming and shaming would be nice.

[silverbax88]

I think you may be missing the point of the article. It is now possible to basically DDOS someone out of their rankings, even if their rankings are legitimate.

[tomp]

This update doesn't change anything, really, it just reverses the effect; before, you were paying SEO black-hats to create links to your site, which should result in elevating your search rank, but now, you will be paying SEO black-hats to create links to competitors' sites, sinking them in the search results, and relatively elevating your search rank.

The only thing search engines can do to stop SEO spam is to avoid giving any weight to spammy links.

[aetherson]

I guess the frustrating difference is:

Suppose that the natural situation, with no SEO at all, is that you have the #1 site on some keyword, and your competitor has a lower ranking.

With "positive" SEO, okay, your competitor might have paid a lot of money and bumped you to the #2 site, and that might be frustrating -- but you're still #2!

With "negative" SEO, your competitor pays a lot of money and now you're #100. And that sucks more for you.

Probably not important in the really big keywords where all the top sites have always paid big money for SEO -- then, sure, it's all just relative. But in the relative backwaters where lots of sites aren't engaging in SEO at all, having negative techniques work is a lot more frustrating to the people who just don't want to play the game.

[Isofarro]

> The only thing search engines can do to stop SEO spam is to avoid giving any weight to spammy links.

That didn't work before. Zero weight for spammy links is gamed by spammers by spamming everything at full blast. There was no downside for them. There are better dials and switches than falling back to a known broken model.

With penalties in place spammers need to get those existing bad links removed for their own sites / or build from scratch new sites with clean link profiles (which they are doing anyway, slash and burn). Now they will need to multiply their efforts to negatively target sites above them (not just rank one site, but unrank several sites). Good luck doing that without leaving a detectable fingerprint/trace.

The history of when links are created - that will leave a clear beacon that a site has been targeted. Unless a spammer does it very slowly over the course of years. In which case, LOL.

Don't you think it would be noticeable that a site ranking well, with a clean back link profile suddenly starts attracting heaps and heaps of bad spammy links? That's a clear indication something is going on.

The better time to use negative SEO is when the spammer has already gotten ahead of his competitor. Then the influx of bad links might look like an effort to regain rankings. That would be more interesting.

[pbhjpbhj]

>avoid giving any weight to spammy links //

Which only requires perfect spam link analysis /s (or no ability to rank sites).

[wlesieutre]

As mentioned in the article, that works if you can identify every spammy link. Without a penalty, you can make a million spammy links, let the filter catch 95% of them, and reap the benefits from the ones that get past.

That system isn't exploitable to sabotage another site's rank, but it also doesn't work at preventing link farms (as evidenced by most Google results before the recent change).

[rasz_pl]

It doesnt take a genius to realize that when you identified 1 million bad links to XXX, and your database has 1.005 links to XXX, you should look carefully at the remaining 5K. Cross reference those sources against other suspicious links and so on.

Basically fight source of bad links, not recipients.

[rasz_pl]

Google, lets stop pretending we are talking about any other search engines, will learn in time to identify and penalize source of spammy links instead of recipients. Webmasters should be responsible only for the content they have control over.

[jacquesm]

The disavow tool is a step in that direction. But frankly, I suspect the only people that are using it are the blackhat SEOs and their customers trying to undo the damage hey caused, the rest of the world does not even realize it exists.

[cpayne624]

Agree 100%. No benefit, no penalty

[thefreeman]

You are totally missing the entire point of this article. People are abusing these techniques to de-rank their competitors.

Perhaps in your specific example, these links are old enough that you can be sure that they were originally done for "seo" purposes. But in many situations that is not the case.

Also, you are completely ignoring the possible situation in which a website was bought by an "ethical" company and now they are trying to clean up the misdeeds of the past.

[freebs]

Please don't forget that many companies may go through multiple SEO/marketing agencies before they find a team that knows what they are doing. Just because someone is cleaning it up doesn't mean they made the mess.

[jacquesm]

Doing due diligence on the parties that you enter into business with is an obligation on the part of the purchaser. Anybody that does something shady which you claim was done outside of your control should be accompanied by a breach of contract lawsuit or something to that effect. And if it isn't then that implies tacit agreement or turning a blind eye to the tactics deployed as long as there are results. Reputable companies keep a tight leash on what subcontractors do in their name.

[lilsunnybee]

Keep in mind that a lot of small businesses are on the internet too, whose owners often don't understand how all this stuff works, and have just hired an SEO consultant or two in the past to help improve their Google search ranking, with no ill intentions other than trying to get more visibility and improve business. My parents are two of these people actually, and changing the rules all of a sudden like Google did, with no warning and a lot of secrecy about what ranking methods were now being used, hurt a lot of small businesses in the process; you don't have to look very hard on many forums to see how badly some people were affected.

And even trying to recover from the change, it's also very difficult. Even after disavowing any outside links, former SEO experts seem pretty clueless about how to improve visibility or even show up on the first few pages for Google now. Short of advice like "rewrite all of your product descriptions so that they don't match anything you have on ebay, so that you're not flagged as duplicating content", there's little help to be found.

[jacquesm]

I'm really sorry for your parents. That said, I think that being clueless about doing business on the internet and doing business on the internet is a combination that should not come with a guaranteed pay-out. If you then employ someone to act on your behalf (without understanding) then even though your intentions are good you could get hurt.

In that sense I sympathize less with your parents than that I sympathize with the owners of the sites that got bombarded with links to your parents website.

Nobody has an automatic right to turnover based on intentions. The most solid way to grow a business is to find your customers through references and to keep them happy, treat any search engine traffic just like you would treat a walk-in new customer. Pamper them and make them happy, don't count on them coming but when they do make sure they stay.

Your parents actively pumped resources (money) into a fight that they could have chosen to simply not engage in. SEO's are a scummy bunch and I see their pitches on a daily basis so I don't fault your parents for falling for it. Even so, the loss of this traffic and the dent to their reputation is their own fault (doing business in unfamiliar territory comes with harsh penalties) and the fault ofthe SEO's who did it to them (though I clearly think the SEO's are vastly more at fault here).

Recovering from the change is hard for a reason, I fail to understand why your parents website should 'show up in the first few pages of Google', there is no automatic right to that and there are only so many subjects and 'first few pages' to begin with.

Rewriting your product descriptions may or may not be a good idea, I don't particularly care about having duplicate content on my sites because I don't particularly care about google traffic.

I understand that if google traffic is all you have that this could all be very hard to stomach and that it may even mean going out of business altogether. But if all the mom-and-pop stores that give a few $100 to shady SEOs would stop doing business online I know that my workload will go down by several hours per week at a minimum. So from that point of view I would not be too sad.

Still, I believe that your mom and dad may be able to survive this if they learn that relying on a single source of traffic is not a good idea. Much better to really build relationships with other online properties that carry weight with their prospective consumers, or to do it like everybody else is doing it: by spending their money on advertising instead of on trying to game organic search.

[lilsunnybee]

Your assertion that SEO's are unequivocally a scummy bunch is wrong and seems pretty irrational to me. A lot of SEO is simply making sure you include good descriptions for items, include keywords, have a properly marked up site so that you are not unfairly penalized, when you have a legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words. The fact that these SEO companies also did affiliate marketing (not spamming links on message boards and people's websites!), used to be considered pretty white hat and necessary to get any sort of ranking above page 39 or something.

Advertising via adwords and things like that is a very expensive activity, with no guarantee of increasing legitimate traffic and interested customers. Prices have increased greatly over time in most categories, and though larger businesses might have the margins where losing a few tens or hundreds of thousands here and there on ineffective advertising might not be a problem, but it disproportionately is for smaller businesses.

The biggest problem is really that Google has a pretty effective monopoly on search, and can extort whatever prices they want for advertising, and can also make widespread secret changes that pretty much affect what sites are allowed to show up on the internet and which are not.

[jacquesm]

> A lot of SEO is simply making sure you include good descriptions for items, include keywords, have a properly marked up site so that you are not unfairly penalized, when you have a legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words.

For the most part we are in agreement here (except for the 'legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words', if there are 100 companies in a certain field then only 10 of them will show up on page 1, regardless of any reasons to show up).

> The biggest problem is really that Google has a pretty effective monopoly on search, and can extort whatever prices they want for advertising, and can also make widespread secret changes that pretty much affect what sites are allowed to show up on the internet and which are not.

This we also are very strongly in agreement on. Monoculture is bad. Monopolies are bad. And no, bing, ddg and so on do not count.

[Isofarro]

Ignorance is not a valid defence. Yes, it's harsh, but that's what entrepreneurs sign up for when they start their own business.

Directors of companies are held responsible for the decisions they made. Delegating that decision to others does not abrogate their responsibilities.

If you are in the SEO industry, please stop hiding behind this. The SEO industry have had ample time and patience to clean itself up (naming and shaming these unethical SEO consultant for starters, offering up material small businesses and mom-and-pop operators, checklists in hiring an ethical SEO practitioner, checklists of methods/practices that should be avoided. How to write up clear statements of work).

[lilsunnybee]

I am not in the SEO industry, and said nothing in defense of unethical SEO practices. My parents are also very ethical people, and would only do business with others they felt were the same way. Just because someone participated in affiliate marketing in previous years, with consenting partner sites, before it was outlawed by Google, does not make them immoral and irresponsible.

And besides paying Google to exist, no one my parents ever talked to even seems to know what it takes these days to show up on Google anymore, because it's secret, so no worries because Google's moral crusade has been successful, never mind the collateral damage.

[resu_nimda]

Well, one of the big lessons of running an internet-based business (or any business, really) is "don't build your business on top of third-party services that you have no contract with or control over."

As you've seen, you can have the rug swept out from under you overnight and there's nothing you can do about it. That's why people are so dismissive of SEO, it (mostly) doesn't create actual value and it's subject to the whims of Google. Your parents fell into that trap.

As jacques said, "the most solid way to grow a business is to find your customers through references and to keep them happy." The old-fashioned way never fails. Get out there and make some people so happy they want to tell all their friends.

[Isofarro]

"Just because someone participated in affiliate marketing in previous years, with consenting partner sites, before it was outlawed by Google, does not make them immoral and irresponsible."

Interesting. Show me where in Google's guidelines Google says it outlaws affiliate marketing.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76465?hl=en -- seems to suggest it's okay in conjunction with a site that's producing good quality content.

[rpedroso]

  So, I hope this stays, as far as I'm concerned google can shut down the disavow tool and those that lived by the sword should die by the sword. It's like an 'own goal' by the bad element in the SEO community.

A company I once worked at received Google search penalties about six months before hiring me. I quickly discovered a lot of the spammy links -- their old SEO vendor exploited the shady tactics that Panda/Penguin were designed to combat.

This wasn't the case of a content farm abusing SEO to ramp up their ad impressions: an innocent company was harmed by a black-hat SEO. The vendor handed in a report with rankings updates and number of links added every month, but nobody at the company was tracking the individual links and keeping track of the vendor's behavior.

I agree that spammy websites should be punished in their search rankings, but the link disavowal tool was integral to removing an innocent company's search penalties.

[Isofarro]

Are they taking their old SEO vendor to court, or are they just going to let them get away with it knowing full well other businesses are none the wiser?

[oddevan]

> At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves).

That seems to be what people are most upset about.

[pbhjpbhj]

>For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine. //

I'm surprised at you for ascribing evil to an entire online industrial sector; I'd think you'd take a more circumspect approach.

Y'know, given that the next line is tantamount to 'I perpetrated a massive copyright infringement on hundreds of thousands of people's online content'; that you might feel that even tortuous actions can sometimes be justified.

People do bad things in most (all?) areas of human activity; SEOs can do good too IMO. It decreases the impact of any analysis to ignore that SEO is a valid activity - albeit, yes, sometimes done in malicious, invalid and/or immoral ways.

[jacquesm]

I call them as I see them. If you want to characterize reocities.com as a copyright infringement case then I invite you to sue.

I take it you have a similar attitude towards archive.org?

SEO's act the same way arms dealers act during an armed conflict. They will happily sell their weapons to all sides while they profit without creating any value for anybody. I don't care one bit about how much traffic google sends me on either ww.com, reocities.com or any of the other web properties that I maintain, I've yet to 'SEO optimize' anything and I feel that SEO's are as an industry just one notch above mass spammers. In some cases worse than spammers (because they actively destroy good websites).

I tend to be rather black-and-white about this because as a webmaster I have to fight these jerks on a regular basis and it tends to show in how I write about them. Consider me pissed off. I feel like I'm in the middle of a shoot-out between Google on the one side, and a bunch of over-active greedy script kiddies and their customers on the other.

If you feel SEO can do good show me an example where an SEO achieved value creation rather than shifting around a percentage in some zero sum game. The only value SEO's create is for themselves.

[pbhjpbhj]

Perhaps ask your "madebyabi" associate whose front page links to http://www.projectweb.gr/seo-consultant.html if you're interested in the work of SEO consultants?

Considering reocities vs. archive.org and in light of copyright law:

Is reocities a registered non-profit organisation? Do archive.org do this - http://imgur.com/vKHha2M to pages to add donation links? (Answer: https://web.archive.org/web/20100218100003/http://www.geocit...). This used to be called "framing" and was considered about the scummiest thing domain owners could do - wrap other peoples content in a frame that was intended to harvest money, or rebadge, without doing anything else.

This was just a random page choice (the imgur.com) link. It's interesting to note they expected the page to be withdrawn, except now it's still here. Archive.org record, at least, that the content owner removed all content and the [new?] domain owner 302ed the site to http://www.ki-society.com/english/.

Archive.org, along with Google, at least at some point was committing copyright infringement in the USA I believe. In the UK (probably NL too by virtue of EU legislation) both these bodies, and the likes of reocities, definitely are still acting tortuously. In USA Field vs Google established a change to the Fair Use rulings that considered SERPs to be transformative and that cached copies - as temporary and unmodified (neither of which reocities pages are) - should be allowed in view of the transformative nature (the court effectively asserting that Google's copy wouldn't be used for content viewing !!).

Internet Archive were sued in 2007 by Shell, http://archive.org/post/119669/lawsuit-settled, and settled stating that Shell's copyright was "valid and enforceable". Internet Archive were sued in 2005 (Healthcare Advocates v.) for failing to remove past archives when a site owner had updated their robots.txt - clearly reocities have no way of assessing a current content owners wishes as to continued archiving.

There is a library exclusion in the USC for archiving digital content (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/11/10/digital_preservation_...) but it requires the content to be kept off-line and only accessible by those physically present. This could be used, or donation of the content to Archive.org or such, if the purpose of the reocities project was simply preservation for posterity.

Aside: The facts of tortuous infringement aren't at all related to my ability to raise finance and sue you on behalf of those content creators whose content you copied without permission (AFAICT none of my content made it through FWIW). I have no wish to at this time. Although presumably I'd only need to issue a DMCA take-down notice as otherwise the domain itself could be targeted for take-down (as it's a .com). But, like Google, I don't think you care if reocities is copyright infringing, do you? You appear to consider the law to be errant and so choose to ignore it.

tl;dr reocities is not transformative (it's just a "framed" copy), is potentially modified without license, is commercial (ie is not registered non-profit and requests donations and is used for SEO purposes (eg footer links to an SEO!)). Ergo not Fair Use in USA (where the content was copied from).

[jacquesm]

Abi made the logo and did some of the css, he did so in record time after I put in a call here on HN if there was someone that could do some design. I was not aware of his SEO activities and I promise solemnly that he did not do anything of the sort for reocities. You're really trying very hard here to tie me to SEO activity, I have no idea what it is that you think you're proving but I'm not going to lose any sleep over that.

As for the rest of your rather long comment, in creating reocities, I, right along with archive team and a bunch of others performed a public service, at considerable expense both in time and funds I might add.

If you feel that your content was copied unjustly then you are free to use the self-service tool to remove it, and if you can't use the self service tool then I'll remove it for you on first request (assuming you are the author of the content).

I've received many thousands of notes from people who were extremely happy their content got saved, and many thousands of requests to remove content, the vast majority of which have been honored. A few by people who are not the original creators were not honored (most of these: SEO scum trying to increase the visibility of their customers by attempting to force offline pages that they don't like).

If you feel like mis-characterizing this you're totally welcome to do so, but I fear that that says more about you than it does about me.

[pbhjpbhj]

>You're really trying very hard here to tie me to SEO activity //

I was merely suggesting that the guy that did your website might not be the scum of the Earth you seem to believe all SEOs are and thinking that - as you appear to judge characters well in general, obv. not mine ;0) - he might be able to disavow you of that notion. When he designed your reocities layout he designed in on-page SEO ... horror! Indeed his prime motivation might well have been the footer link, perhaps he is evil after all.

OK, so 'everyone loves reocities' (many people love torrent hosts too); but it's still a massive copyright infringement. Personally I think the content that people cared about was saved, moved, backed up already and that very little would have been lost that was worth keeping. The real value was to harvest the content to stick an ad-block or donation wrapper around it.

The point where we started [my paraphrase of course] was that you ostensibly said "all SEO are scum" and I said that as you were able to see past your own tortuous activities to see your perceived good in them I found it strange that you'd classify everyone working in SEO, like your web-designer, that way.

I find it really hard to see how you think making sure a website gets a deserved position in the SERPs (yes SEO can be used nefariously too, I'm not denying that) is so evil. Yet you think wrapping someone else's work up in a donation and ad-banner that take up half-a-screen without so much a as a by-your-leave is fine.

If it's about saving content owners then you can simply announce "all content owners wishing their content to be retained on reocities contact us by December 2015; content we don't have a license to use will be removed at that date". You can even keep an offline copy of the archive if you're in to historic preservation. Even better, if you cared at all about not infringing on peoples copyright would be to have the content available and put it up at owners request - or if a fair use argument for a particular piece of content was made.

I've said it before - you're well off the mark both morally and legally with this one I'm afraid.

[SquareWheel]

>If you feel SEO can do good show me an example where an SEO achieved value creation rather than shifting around a percentage in some zero sum game.

Your generalizations are really quite misguided. SEOs achieve value when they optimize sites to fit Google's guidelines, which as it happens also benefits humans. Converting Flash sites to HTML, reorganizing the URL structure to convert ?articleid=5 to /my-great-article/, adding alt tags for screen readers, optimizing page speed, creating sitemaps, cleaning up 404s. Whitehat SEOs are often the caretakers of the web.

It's easy to focus on the bad guys who spam keywords and buy likes, but it's ignorant to assume that's all the industry consists of.

[jacquesm]

No, that does not create value. It creates the impression of creating value, but in actual fact the same number of $ are spent online so the only thing that changes is where the money is spent. Value creation is a way to get out of the zero sum game.

[rfergie]

If a business X is 5% better than business Y (for whatever reason) and marketing helps a customer go to business X rather than business Y then value is being created.

[jacquesm]

If you ask the business owners of X and Y which business is the better one then I'm sure that you'll get two different answers.

I don't think it is so hard to see that value creation is something that can't exist without creation. So when you take a set of low value inputs and you combine them (say, raw materials + energy + labour) and you then get something that you can sell for more than the inputs were worth then you have created value.

Marketing by itself does not create value (other than that it diverts some funds to the marketeer and possibly some funds from consumers to companies whose products are being marketed). Marketing creates turnover, not value.

[Isofarro]

"marketing helps a customer go to business X rather than business Y"

That is a succinct description of a zero-sum game.

* Business X gains the same amount business Y loses.

There is no additional value!

[UweSchmidt]

The activities that you've described seem quite basic: either something that any amateur can do by following a todo list, if the CMS doesn't take care of that anyway (prompt for alt tags, have sane URLs as default etc.).

While the SEO industry might be doing that also, that seems to be a fig leave for the actual activities.

Or is anyone making a living being the caretaker of the web, cleaning up 404s?

[walshemj]

Ok

I used to be in house SEO for a large publisher (wont say which one but you would know the name) one project we did was a recovery after a botched transition of a property website (similar presence to Zillow or right move) they screwed up their browse structure migration

I also detected and got fixed a mistake on a large UK recruitment site that was costing them £500,000 in 5 days.

Btw I am available at reasonable rates for consulting/ explaining to your developers how to do their job properly

[boobsbr]

> When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com

I'm really scared of finding my old homepage there. Dorkiness level off the charts...

Do you know if Fortunecity was ever re-hosted in a similar fashion? I had a Diablo 1 clan page there somewhere.

[jacquesm]

> I'm really scared of finding my old homepage there. Dorkiness level off the charts...

Hehe, let me know if you want it removed.

> Do you know if Fortunecity was ever re-hosted in a similar fashion? I had a Diablo 1 clan page there somewhere.

Web.archive.org may have it.

[walshemj]

Your scraping geocities for MFA and your trashing SEOs :-) a good example Cognitive dissonance -you certainty have a lot of Chutzpah.

golf clap

[jacquesm]

I think you're projecting here. Reocities cost a ton of money to create, costs money to run and has $0 income. What you would do with it is a totally different matter, I just run it as a public service and if I shut it down tomorrow I'll have more money next month than I do today.

[DontBeADick]

I think your eagerness to pat yourself on the back has caused you to miss the main point of the article.

Congrats on your geocities thing, I guess?

[spudlyo]

Your nickname reminder isn't working. Try a post-it note on your monitor.

[dang]

Please stop being personally rude in HN comments.

This comment would be better if, in addition to not being personally rude, it told us what the main point of the article really is.

[tlogan]

  edit: the voting on this comment is interesting, 1->+9->+1->+9->+5

People working for Google +1

Others -1

Does that make sense?

[jacquesm]

> People working for Google +1

That would be a first.

I don't usually find myself 'on the side of google' in any argument and I highly doubt that so many googlers would be unable to think for themselves but would blindly upvote anything supportive of their employer.

By the same token, I don't think 'everybody else' includes all the people working in SEO.