Yet another Negative SEO attack question.
-
I need help reconciling two points of view on spammy links.
On one hand, Google seems to say, "Don't build spammy links to your website - it will hurt your ranking." Of course, we've seen the consequences of this from the Penguin update, of those who built bad links got whacked.
From the Penguin update, there was then lots of speculation of Negative SEO attacks. From this, Google is saying, "We're smart enough to detect a negative SEO attack.", i.e: http://youtu.be/HWJUU-g5U_I
So, its seems like Google is saying, "Build spammy links to your website in an attempt to game rank, and you'll be penalized; build spammy links to a competitors website, and we'll detect it and not let it hurt them."
Well, to me, it doesn't seem like Google can have it both ways, can they? Really, I don't understand why Competitor A doesn't just go to Fiverr and buy a boatload of crappy exact match anchor links to Competitor B in an attempt to hurt Competitor B. Sure, Competitor B can disavow those links, but that still takes time and effort. Furthermore, the analysis needed for an unsophisticated webmaster could be daunting.
Your thoughts here? Can Google have their cake and eat it too?
-
If it can be proven that the intention was to cause harm to another companies profits I would think you could be held liable. There is enough documentation on the web to show that Google penalizes for bad links and that negative SEO exists, if there is proof that you were doing what Google tells you not to do against your competition and it results in a penalty that Google says will happen, it seems like bad intentions can be proven and in that case you could be found guilty in a court of law. I am not aware of any precedents though.
-
Thanks, your reply helps keep this in perspective.
if it is proven that you created these links my guess would be
you could be held liable in court.This would be another interesting tangent discussion. Of course, the defense would be the first amendment right of freedom of publishing. In my feeble knowledge, I'm not aware of a court case that has encountered this issue, but it's an interesting legal question: Could you be held civilly liable for merely publishing links?
-
I completely agree with your comments Steve. Especially when it comes to a niche where there are only a couple of big companies and it's seasonal. If you can knock out the competitor during their busiest month of the year you've done major damage to them and have benefited yourself greatly. It's a horrible, shady practice and even though Google initiated the penalty, if it is proven that you created these links my guess would be you could be held liable in court.
-
Why is competitor A spending their time and money trying to harm Competitor
B whenthey can simply protect themself with the Disavow Tool Why not
spend those time and money on building quality links.Buying links on Fiverr = $5 and five minutes.
Disavowing links = a couple of hours of analysis or paying someone a bit of cash for the analysis.
So, it's easier to create the havoc, than to clean it up. I'm sure we're all on the same page that such a technique isn't ethical, doesn't help you build up your business, is bad business karma, and so on. But, is it feasible? Apparently so. Especially when the stakes are high, for Commerce sites, it seems like this would become a tempting strategy for the less ethically inclined.
-
There is no way that Google can know (unless you are intentionally transparent about it) if someone you paid or someone a competitor paid built those links for you. Negative SEO is very real but it takes time and money to get a site penalized, and now it's easier than it ever was to disavow links and get a site back which helps take some of the punch out of the negative SEO business.
-
Hi Steve,
I think I see your point. However, if Competitor A buys low quality links to Competitor B, yes, they can use the disavow tool to remove the links and it will still take time for them to do so and effort but what is the point in this. Why is competitor A spending their time and money trying to harm Competitor B when they can simply protect themself with the Disavow Tool Why not spend those time and money on building quality links.
Competitor A is simply wasting time and money to buy links where Competitor B is spending time and effot to remove them. I don't see why anyone would do that.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I Report A SEO Agency to Google
Our competitor has employed the services of a spammy SEO agency that sends spammy links to our site. Though our rankings were affected we have taken the necessary steps. It is possible to send evidence to Google so that they can take down the site. I want to take this action so that other sites will not be affected by them again.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Halmblogmusic0 -
I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.
Hi there, I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc.. however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week. The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good? Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now. Thanks for reading! duGeW
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binkez321 -
Why Google cached another site, not mine?
Hi Guys, please help me. I need your help regarding my business website i.e. https://www.kamagratablets.com/. Before 8-10 days it was ranked in top 10 from home page but I lost my position and ranking page also changed by Google. If you will check caching of this website then you will see Google cache another site - http://www.hiphoptoptower.com/ - I have checked my code and nothing found related to this website. Please check and help me on this point, how can I remove this site from caching and get my previous ranking in Google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
Red Square SEO Backlinking Service. Does Anyone Have Any FeedBack On Them?
Ive done quite a bit of research and I'm strongly considering using a back linking service to speed up my rankings. The one I found to be the best is Red Square SEO, do any of you guys have any feedback on them? Heres their website. http://www.redsquareseo.net
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Voltron0 -
Real Vs. Virtual Directory Question
Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc. My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately. Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it? Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ClayPotCreative0 -
On page SEO? (This is good! I promise)
I have been doing some research on onsite optimization and I hit a dead end, need some help with OnSite.... These three I get for the most part... (If you would like to add anything please do) Title optimization - needs to be unique with keywords included under 90 words Meta description - needs to be unique with keywords included under 150 words Meta keywords – all keywords Questions begin here... H1 headings – Should this be the first thing the spider crawls? Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? (H1s are under the logo at the top of every one of my sites pages) H2-H6 headings – Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? Bold text – does this matter for SEO? Italic text - does this matter for SEO? Link anchor text – These are the same on most pages. However, most of these links are part of the navigation, does this matter for SEO? is this duplicate? how does the search engine analyze this data? Image alt attributes – I have the share image buttons on my site (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) and they have the same alt attributes on each page. Does this matter for SEO? Body text – I found a competitor site that’s ranking #1 for a key term. This competitor has 11,106 words in their body with the keyword mentioned 29 times (0.8%). They placed all this text in a small scroll down on the bottom of their page. Its strange how they included it. Please review attached image. the competitor URL is http://www(dot)1804design(dot)com/ w6AiM.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0