[andrenotgiant]

I think you need to break your argument into two parts.

1. People ARE creating spammy links that point to competitor sites in the hopes of damaging their search rankings. - You have proven this.

2. As a result of a competitor creating spammy links to your site, your rankings in Google have been permanently negatively effected. - I don't think the data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation. Lots of moving parts in Google's algorithm, the internet, your site...

Did the site get warnings in Webmaster Tools? Did you go through the disavow links process? How long ago?

[matnewton85]

Why are you even arguing with this? Do you have any experience with SEO?

I use negative SEO regularly to drop sites out of the top 10 in Google. I only target low quality sites that shouldn't be in there anyway, but Google in all their algorithmic wisdom has ranked them, so... I knock them out.

Low quality 5 page Adsense sites shouldn't outrank actual, legitimate businesses so it's just a case of click click, BOOM. I never target the actual competitors of my clients.

Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. It just has to be.

[jacquesm]

> Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays.

The fact that you feel you represent the SEO professional community and that it is part of the standard toolkit to me is proof positive that the whole SEO community is a morally bankrupt bunch. It's just shades of gray all the way to 'black', parasitic rather than symbiotic and a net negative.

How you guys sleep at night is a mystery to me.

Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

We should be happy you exist so you can correct Google? And the fact that your paying customers rise accordingly is nothing but an unhappy coincidence?

> I never target the actual competitors of my clients.

A so you're the kind of SEO that as some kind of public service improves the google index for his own gratification. Sorry, I don't but that for a second.

Absolutely incredible this comment, but thank you for owning up to it.

Feel free to list your customers here so I can make sure to never ever do business with any of them.

[rwhitman]

Scolding pro blackhat SEO guys is an effort in futility. And the fact he confirmed using the technique also means that its no longer as effective

I'm sure most of his customers have no idea what he's doing either. With these guys its don't ask don't tell relationship. "I'll get your rank up for XYZ keywords for $70k a month but don't ask any questions on how". They do 15 minutes of work a day maintaining some link wheels, maybe some shady stuff like knocking sites out of the rankings, and collect twice the average american salary each month from the client. With that kind of income to work ratio moral obligations are easy to ignore

[matnewton85]

correction, I'm a whitehat SEO who fights blackhat SEOs.

[lmm]

> Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

Who is Google to? Google is no more neutral or accountable than SEO folk, and is just as much a profit-oriented business as they are.

Google makes the rules and the rest of us play by them. And surprisingly enough, Google encourages the behaviour it rewards. If Google's policies are pro-evil I'd rather that evil be done by competent, organized professionals (who will be able to turn it off when Google changes its policies to something better, and who create a somewhat level playing field, even if it's everyone paying rent to an SEO expert) than haphazardly by a bunch of amateurs.

[jacquesm]

Feel free to build you own search engine! The more the merrier, especially if they can get up to the scale of Google. Monoculture is bad, especially when monoculture leads to diseases attacking the one strain that dominates.

On the other hand we could of course try to (reaching here) argue that these SEO's improve google because they are forcing it to up its game but I think the web as a whole would be better off without all this crap.

Theory: when a new dominant search engine emerges ways will be found to game it to such an extent that the damage to the web offsets any gains from the increased ability to find content.

[lmm]

> we could of course try to (reaching here) argue that these SEO's improve google because they are forcing it to up its game but I think the web as a whole would be better off without all this crap.

The alternative is what, that the result you'd get for, I don't know, "home insurance" would be essentially random?

Google has some opinion on what properties the best result for that would have. Sites will naturally conform to the google policy (which is good when google promotes things that are good for the general web, like fast load times and accessible markup, and bad when google promotes things that are bad for the general web). The SEO industry just makes this process more efficient, meaning changes to what Google "wants" in results take effect faster. Even if Google's policies were effectively random (which I don't think they are), the worst-case result would be that businesses who paid attention to keeping their SEO up to date would appear higher in search results than businesses which didn't - which is at least some kind of barometer of a healthy business.

[matnewton85]

Hey Jacques

Sorry for the delay, I don't come to HN very often.

I sleep quite easily at night. Google is very bad at what they do when it comes to spam. They deliberately under-resource their spam team and have maintained a fairly incompetent hack managing said team for a long time now. Their motivations? Anyone's guess, but that's the fact of the matter.

Search for payday loans and this result comes up on page 2:

http://www.suryavanshi.org/disadvantages-of-payday-loans.php

This page is spam, pure and simple and falls foul of Google's own guidelines.

> Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

Google puts out these guidelines so people can determine the quality of websites. Pure and simple.

Unfortunately, their own algorithm isn't good at recognising these bad actors.

This is where Negative SEO comes in. As stated elsewhere, nSEO is only genuinely possible where a site is sitting on the edge (as above) OR, unfortunately, to attack small businesses.

I'm NEVER going to attack a legitimate business. I AM going to attack spammers, and YES my clients do benefit.

I don't like spammers, you don't like spammers, and it just so turns out that Google is not so great at dealing with them, mostly because they don't care that much.

Quite frankly, I'm not going to sit around and wait for them to haul their asses into gear 18 months later to fix it.

I don't just do nSEO, I also report spam listings to TripAdvisor and any other site who listens to my spam notifications. Of course my competitors benefit when I remove spam to their advantage. Why shouldn't they?

[SteveGerencser]

I find it interesting that you have chosen to take one comment from one person, question his ability to represent an entire professional community, yet in the very next breath use that same person to define an entire group as morally bankrupt.

[jacquesm]

Oh, I don't question his ability to represent the community at all. Maybe I should re-write that sentence to remove any ambiguity? I think he's a fine specimen, quite representative judging by the offers I get from him and his colleagues.

[cm2012]

I don't have any skin in the game, but what if we do a thought experiment?

You are a marketer who is running a big physical sign in real life near some intersection, selling widgets. There are always 10 other signs there. There is one very overworked official who checks the signs to make sure they aren't overtly bad for people looking at them.

You notice that two of the signs competing with your client blatantly say that they sell widgets, that their widgets cure cancer, and that other cancer treatments are shams. You know that this sign will mislead or annoy people at the very least, and also that the officials who decide what signs stay up would probably removed it if they look closer.

It just so happens that you know that the overworked official will look closer at signs if you put a red flag on them. Putting a red flag on a "good" sign will make the official look closer but not do anything about it. But if the official notices the "bad" signs in question, he will probably take them down.

You do it self servingly, of course, but if the signs weren't on the "bad" side in the first place, then the official wouldn't take it down. It's arguable that its not immoral to flag those signs - the flag just tells the overworked official algorithm to look closer and a little more stringently.

---

To be clear: I don't do negative SEO or anything not 100% white hat in the little SEO work I do. But applying negative SEO to an otherwise "good website" is like putting weight concrete on the base of an already huge pillar. It can really only hurt borderline sites, as defined by Google's rules.

[jacquesm]

I like your thought experiment. Check out elsewhere in this thread how it works in real life. Thought experiments are great when they can teach you a new insight about how something actually works (for instance, Einstein and the elevator), but when they describe an alternate reality then they are less useful.

If you have a problem with signs near an intersection you petition the city council without touching the signs by your false-advertising competitors, but in the real world no flags are placed, but websites are forcibly removed from the index or pushed down so far that it does not matter. By analogy, you don't flag the bad signs, you go and burn down the signs by the competition leaving just your own.

This is one reason that during election times (when the tempers can run quite high) removing a sign of a political party can come with surprisingly high penalties.

BTW, if any company engages in false advertising there are other ways to resolve that.

> I don't have any skin in the game,

and

> I don't do negative SEO or anything not 100% white hat in the little SEO work I do.

Are inconsistent.

[Dylan16807]

You're doing very strange things to the analogy. To be closer to the real activities, it's like putting a bunch of red flags under the sign. Nobody (except the city coucil) actually touches the target sign. Nobody actually touches the target website. There is no direct attacking going on.

[jacquesm]

> There is no direct attacking going on.

I don't think we're going to agree on this.

[Fuzzwah]

The road is diverted so that people driving on the road can no longer see the sign.....

[gk1]

You make a great point, but there's already a way to plant that "red flag": You can report websites for bad behavior to Google.[0]

It's a different thing entirely to take matters into your own hands and plant dynamite under the "bad signs."

[0] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

[matnewton85]

Ever tried it? Trust me, it doesn't work.

[qeorge]

The problem is that in this case, "putting a red flag on [a website]" means creating 10s or 100s of thousands of spam blog comments on random websites.

Abusing your metaphor further: it would be more like spray painting the phone number of the shady business on every house in town. Certainly the officials would have to notice them then, thanks to your good works! Too bad for the home owners though...

[Dylan16807]

The spam-filled sites in the article were owned by the person performing SEO. No third parties need to be spammed.

[gk1]

To those reading the above post and wondering if this is acceptable behavior for SEO's: It isn't. It's called black-hat SEO, and it's full of people like this who pull dirty tricks without any shame. They even justify it to themselves--they're doing it because somebody's gotta do it, and everybody does it anyway!

[normloman]

"Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays."

Yes, because sabotaging your competitors with shady spamdexing practices fits most people's definition of "professional."

[neurobro]

It's just a natural extension of the techniques that PR firms (or before the 1940s, propagandists) have been using for centuries.

[cm2012]

There's not really any similar techniques there, except that the tactics are a bit slimy. It's not like you can make an appeal to Google's Pathos.

[neurobro]

With the rising prominence of sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, etc., I wouldn't rule out the possibility of appealing to Google's pathos in the near future. E.g. blog farms badmouthing competitors without even the hassle of building natural-looking links.

[adventured]

Morally it's absolutely no different than Apple running PC guy ads targeting Microsoft, Windows, and PC makers in general. It was a negative campaign meant to harm the competition by making fun of it.

[normloman]

No it's totally different. Apple ran ads against Microsoft. They didn't prevent people from finding Microsoft's site on a search engine.

[scott_s]

The exchange, paraphrased:

andrenotgiant: I am unfamiliar with this area, so I need evidence to convince me that this technique makes a difference.

matnewton85: I am personally familiar with this area, and my personal experience says that this technique works.

So, the answer to your question is: because your personal experience does not qualify as evidence to someone else.

[fuire8]

and who are to knock them out ?

[3RqGFE22ZMuOXNU]

I completely agree, someone needs to drop these low quality sites out of the top 10 in Google.

Here is a typical example of a website that I think needs negative SEOing:

http://www.matthewnewton.net/

[jacquesm]

That is very much un-called for, as much as the OP is distasteful to me your action is far worse.

[penguat]

I'd've thought some google.com domains would be a far clearer target?

[matnewton85]

Go for it dude, not trying to rank it for anything.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> The data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation.

As long as google keep the ranking details secret (i.e. always, with good reason) then absolute proof is hard.

You're right that "Correlation does not equal causation" but it don't discount correlation entirely either. This evidence is enough to treat the claims that negative SEO does not happen with extreme scepticism. The burden of proof has moved.

Given that there are penalties for some links, what is the mechanism that makes negative SEO non-existent? And how do you prove that this mechanism is infallible.

[johnward]

Do you think google can determine that your spammy link came from you or some other "seo"? I don't. There already is proof that these spammy links damage your ranking since penguin. Google even admitted it. That was the entire point of those updates. The only thing they have avoided is coming out and saying "negative SEO is a thing". As long as rank penalties exist negative SEO will exist.