Slimeball SEO

[Trevor Kuntz]

A step-by-step guide to successfully being a dick and destroying competitors through negative SEO.
Successful Negative SEO Case Study - Main Backlinks/SEO Discussion - Traffic Planet

Feel free to be angry after you read that.

 

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[Pete799p]

The thing that makes me mad about this is the reality that is big business. I used to love google for creating a great business by being the bigger man. Not loading their site with ads and other spamy bs while delivering good results and lots of great free tools. Now that they have become way too money hungry they are doing everything to make money at the expense of small businesses. I hope that their most recent updates and profit hungry changes drive users to a new competitor. The world is always better with more competition.

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

Yeah, I agree. I have yet to find a search engine as good as Google though. Maybe when they move to all paid results on the first page, people will start to use something else. As much as I'm not really a fan of Apple and Microsoft, I'm glad that there are still big players left who can compete with Google and who sites on the bad side of Google can ally themselves with. I love watching the war. Haha.

But yeah, this negative SEO stuff just disgusts me.

 

[kurtyordy]

I think this will have the opposite affect google wants in that I believe the door open for negative SEO means that blackhat SEO is now a safer bet for your site.

If you set up your site with seo wise with lets just say 20 incoming links per day (I am going to make this really basic for illustration purpose and not addressing tiered linking etc.). with these efforts you get to page one. Now someone comes in and builds 1000 link/day to your site and wham google squashes you.

Other choice is you blackhat from the beginning. Your site is regularly getting 2000+ link/day. some negative guy starts building 1000 link/day to your site and guess what, less affect because it is less of an anomoly.

so in google's attempt to clean up the serps, they created negative seo which in affect strengthened the case for those who create a messy (spammy) serps.

 

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[Pete799p]

I have already found that after panda their results are not as good as they used to be. I will type in a keyword and get a bunch of random spamy sites or really old sites that have not been updated etc. I think their could be room in the not too distant future that would essentially start in the same manner as google especially if they turn the whole first page into ppc ads. Create a simple site with little advertisement that provides quality search results.

 

[LightHouse]

This is why going public for any tech company is a bad idea. You become less nimble and react only to shareholder woes, which is all tied to money. I also agree that i get a lot of searches now a days which just give me shit information. The thing is, while some better SERPS might get advertisers, this affects keywords that will never have advertisers and all the user gets is shitty results with no solutions. It's a recepie for disaster on googles part and an open opportunity for someone to compete in the future. The thing is, if MS can't do it with all their money and resources... who can! Facebook could definitely do it, but they are keeping a focus on what counts, their main business.

As far as negative SEO, as much as it sucks to see someone's business in the dumps from something, its business. If anything this opens peoples eyes to structuring your business outside of google and establishing authority period.

Thanks for posting this, i had not seen it yet!

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

Yeah, I think it's just a matter of waiting out Google. Either they will completely dominate search or they will start to lose share to a competitor. I was going to say that I have tried to use Bing and just couldn't stand the format, but after opening Bing up right now, it looks like maybe they changed their format? It looks almost exactly like Google now. I could totally work with that.

 

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[The-J]

That's f*cked up. It just goes to show: basing a business off search engine traffic primarily is very rarely a good idea.

You can survive this with a powerful enough brand in your niche that spammy stuff won't hurt it and SEO won't really damage your income stream. Recovering from it is a bit harder though.

 

[jljtech]

This type of activity is unfortunate but it is no different than what happens offline all the time. I am sure that if we had a statistical representation of how many "legitimate" companies engage in this activity, we would be shocked.

People fail to realize that there is a contingent of competition out there that will go to any length to see your site/business suffer. It may be done in an effort to out rank you or just out of spite. When i read things like this all i can think about is corporate espionage and negative ad campaigns.

As google changes its algorithm, it will be easy to identify what negative actions are most effective. Take the "penguin" update for example. It smashed links from known blog networks. If you had any of those on your site, you saw a nice drop in the serps. A negative campaign could easily focus on that and start spamming.

Really the only defense is a solid offense and good brand reputation. We can only hope that Google will enhance their algo's to detect this behavior. Right now it is wayyyy to easy to buy some spammy SEO packages and go to work on someones site.

Negative reviews
spammy link pyramids
stolen content
All extremely easy to obtain and ridiculously cheap if i might add.

This is why it is important to focus on multiple advertising methodologies. Just the same as you would focus on multiple streams of income.

Proper diversification is more important than you think. BRB.... Checking my serps...:smug2:

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

I wish that Google allowed a way to disregard links. If a webmaster was able to neutralize links so that they neither had positive or negative effects, it would allow a defense against negative SEO and it would make Google's job easier because then they could go after even more spam without losing the trust of webmasters.

This makes sense, unless of course, Google's main goal IS to create a civil war amongst webmasters, in which case, they're on the right track.

 

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