[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.....

[Dylan16807]

Google / city council does that. The SEO actor does nothing to the target, only to influence google.

[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.