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[pugyrob]

Thanks, these Aren't really my thoughts more known facts but I forget this is a domain name forum at times. Three examples of how it could work below then I will leave this alone as too time consuming-

Quick question though. You are saying someone can hurt their site by building the wrong links to it but someone else cannot hurt your site by building links to it as jf they were you? No logic there I'm afraid? Google built the disavow tool for this reason...

When I wrote the article on seobook I got over 100 cases of negative Seo emailed to me alone. Add to that almost every decent Seo I know would have experienced it. Onto the points;

1) you own a site in a niche you dominate. You see a press release saying that someone just paid a lot of money for a domain name in your space that was parked.The buyer has obvious intentions to compete. You can now be lovely and buy that new competitor some lovely links before he has a chance to even get going. In turn you make this a nightmare for him to gain trust and rank. He has to disavow and hope but ask most people and the disavow tool is about as much use as an underwater cigarette.

2) you own an emd in a niche and have 3 inbound links. This emd still makes you £,£££ per month and ranks( yes these niches exist). People around you with more links see It getting an emd bonus think ok here are 1000 nice links for you have them on me!! You will be nuked eventually no question if they did this properly.

3) you have a "normal" Seo type site. Usual candidates like botw directory and average so called white hat links. You have say 50-200 of these and rank nicely. Someone comes and buys you blogrolls and a few site wides to tip you over some anchor text thresholds. Again the next penguin gets you if not before.

As I say if there are 500 ways an Seo can screw his own site through dodgy links, how could someone else not do it and how could google tell the difference? Even matt cutts admits it exists and he is the ultimate pr monger about such things. He does think it is rare but admits it happens and says "if you are worried about negative Seo use the disavow tool"

I take on board your points but assume you are either quite new to Seo or are perhaps in nicer, less lucrative niches.

 

[pugyrob]

There are hundreds of studies around like this http://www.tastyplacement.com/infographic-testing-negative-seo

I've read a lot of cases on other forums and case studies as well as friends and my own ones

 

[Murray]

Quick question though. You are saying someone can hurt their site by building the wrong links to it but someone else cannot hurt your site by building links to it as jf they were you? No logic there I'm afraid? Google built the disavow tool for this reason...

I'm trying to think how to put this, I may fail to do it eloquently.

It's like building a house of cards, artificially ranking on questionable/spamy links, the higher you get the more noticeable the structure is (to google) and the more unsteady it gets and likely it is to fall.

But on the other hand if you have a very solid foundation built on bricks (authority links) then if someone puts some flimsy cards on top and they fall off no harm no foul.

I take on board your points but assume you are either quite new to Seo or are perhaps in nicer, less lucrative niches.

I've been a member/moderator on one of the biggest SEO forums for a couple of years now, all though it was taken over by Jim from the Ninjas recently-ish and has gone a bit stagnant.

 

[pugyrob]

Saying that is a publicity stunt is plain silly. Pm me and I will leave you in no doubt that you are talking nonsense on that score but I don't want to go over it all up in a public forum.

Funny they made a disavow tool at all really, why would google bother if other peoples links can't hurt you .anyways all the best I've said my piece as the offer stands to pm me if you want facts to go with your opinions on my site.

 

[pugyrob]

Oh and the main reason I don't want to go over it in public is because it means naming 5 other sites in my exact same niche who had the exact same thing done to them over 12 months prior.They contacted me after they read my article and we all agreed who it was.The only difference was that they didn't try to turn it into a positive and get pr from it.

 

[Murray]

Funny they made a disavow tool at all really, why would google bother if other peoples links can't hurt you .anyways all the best I've said my piece as the offer stands to pm me if you want facts to go with your opinions on my site.

1. So people are scared and police themselves.

2. So google can get given a lot of data on what normal webmasters themselves believe are spammy sites

Like a bulk spam report tool in a way.

I'm sure it gives googles spam team a lot of interesting data.

 

[pugyrob]

Pm sent. If you still feel the same after that then so be it

 

[Blossom]

It's like building a house of cards, artificially ranking on questionable/spamy links, the higher you get the more noticeable the structure is (to google) and the more unsteady it gets and likely it is to fall.

But on the other hand if you have a very solid foundation built on bricks (authority links) then if someone puts some flimsy cards on top and they fall off no harm no foul.

'Authority' links can still be questionable links though.

Even down to the level where a link from site A might be considered a spammy link for site B, but an authority link for site C.

 

[mojoco]

Negative SEO doesn't really exist.

The best you could do is get the target a unnatural links warning, which in reality will mean nothing more than google is telling them they don't trust some links pointing at their site; you could hope then the site owner starts stripping their own legitimate links in a panic and sabotaging themselves..

If negative SEO does exist and It's easy, someone please knock Matt Cutts blog off #1 spot for Matt Cutts, I guarantee you wont be able to.

^ I haven't read about anyone trying to, but I'm someone out there already has.

Negative SEO absolutely exists. I have recently had nearly 6,000 spammy links directed to a site of mine in a competitive niche. Causing the site to drop from page one to page 5.

 

[Murray]

Negative SEO absolutely exists. I have recently had nearly 6,000 spammy links directed to a site of mine in a competitive niche. Causing the site to drop from page one to page 5.

Would be very interested to hear more about this if you would be happy to send me a PM with details, thanks.

 

[kate-brownhill]

Just a quick contribution. We had a site which was just over 12 months old. Very clean profile and nice steady increase in the ranking. This site had a product review feature. This feature, enabled us to look at comments and moderate them before publishing the comments. Therefore allowing us to clear all the spam before it became live.

Unfortunately, on a bug fix release, we inadvertently allowed comments to be published without moderation. We noticed this 8 days after the fix was implemented. By that time, we had over 1000 spammy comments on many products with lots of links. You know the type, pharm, casino, watches etc...

Obviously, these comments were easily removed. Unfortunately, what is not so easy to remove are the "second tier" links that were built to those comments. A common old blackhat xrumer trick that you can see advertised on Warrior forum, DP forum and others. These were the worst type of links you can possibly imaging. porn links, profile links, really bad stuff. The observation? as soon as those links started getting indexed by Google, the rankings started to drop. Not a penalty type drop, but a gradual, consistent drop day by day. Yes, we filed a disavow and although it helped for a bit, more and more links got indexed and it, in the end, drowned the site to the point that its link profile is so bad, it was just pointless carrying on. We have now dumped the site. By the way, we also did a Reconsideration request explaining what happened but received a standard no penalty found message as this was not a manual penalty but algorithmically one.

This is just one example. We see this “weighing down” effect quite often with SEO clients that have sites with history. It normally manifests itself as difficult to budge rankings. We actually developed a way of measuring this using a set of links. We call it the “prod” and it allows us to estimate how a site will react to a good SEO campaign by measuring the reaction the site has compared to the expected result. It’s not watertight, but we found it surprisingly accurate in its predictions.

In short, negative SEO, on sites that are not as well established or well known as Matt Cutts blog, is alive and well. Let’s not forget that the vast majority of sites on the internet are far closer to the one described in my example above then to Matt Cutts blog or other high authority sites. Hope this helps. 

 

[Murray]

1000 spammy comments on many products with lots of links. You know the type, pharm, casino, watches etc...

Obviously, these comments were easily removed. Unfortunately, what is not so easy to remove are the "second tier"

Why didn't you just change the product pages URLs if you thought they were causing that much of a problem?....

If your theory is correct, delete those product pages so they 404 and the domain should be all good and back to ranking again after a few months if that was the real problem.

 

[kate-brownhill]

Why didn't you just change the product pages URLs if you thought they were causing that much of a problem?....

If your theory is correct, delete those product pages so they 404 and the domain should be all good and back to ranking again after a few months if that was the real problem.

Yes, that was what we used to do in the past and it worked. Although, we did it with a 410 not a 404. Unfortunately, ever since penguin 1, the effectiveness of that little trick diminished. Ill be interested to hear if you had better recent experience with this?

Saying that, we don't really have much to lose so I might give it another try and see how it goes.

 

[Murray]

Yes, that was what we used to do in the past and it worked. Although, we did it with a 410 not a 404. Unfortunately, ever since penguin 1, the effectiveness of that little trick diminished.

I wouldn't call it a trick so much, just the easiest way to dump spammy links since they aren't pointing at your site anymore.

If you you were and those links were you problem and did remove those pages + a reasonable amount of time has passed and things haven't changed, then it would seem like your real cause may lie elsewhere.

 

[kate-brownhill]

I wouldn't call it a trick so much, just the easiest way to dump spammy links since they aren't pointing at your site anymore.

If you you were and those links were you problem and did remove those pages + a reasonable amount of time has passed and things haven't changed, then it would seem like your real cause may lie elsewhere.

I can see where you are coming from, and as already explained we have done that to many sites with good success but have you actually tried it yourself since penguin? I am asking as we have since seen a trend whereas the domain as a whole is being tarnished even after the 410 or the removal of the pages. Admittedly, last time we tried is 6 months ago now which is why i'm interested to see if you actually have experience of a positive result.

 

[Murray]

I can see where you are coming from, and as already explained we have done that to many sites with good success but have you actually tried it yourself since penguin? I am asking as we have since seen a trend whereas the domain as a whole is being tarnished even after the 410 or the removal of the pages. Admittedly, last time we tried is 6 months ago now which is why i'm interested to see if you actually have experience of a positive result.

I don't have any penguin hit sites & I don't do SEO for others so no.

I have seen a lot of penguin hit sites though and all of them had awful link profiles, barely a saving grace natural looking link between them.

So if you think you were hit by penguin and you did have a natural link profile before the introduction of spammy links & haven't recovered, then you in fact never had a natural link profile at all.

Obviously what I'm saying depends on if penguin is really your problem, I have seen many strong sites affected by panda.

If you want to pm me the site and take a look at it id give you my honest opinion & assessment.

 

[kate-brownhill]

Murray, I am a bit confused as I am not sure where in what I wrote made you assume we were hit by Penguin?

 

[Murray]

Murray, I am a bit confused as I am not sure where in what I wrote made you assume we were hit by Penguin?

I think it was because you said penguin more than once..

You also said you believed links were your problem + you didn't have a manual penalty because you submitted a reconsideration request, that leaves penguin.

So if you don't think it was penguin, then you don't think it was the links? so why are you talking about the links being a problem.

That is where my confusion has arisen.

 

[kate-brownhill]

I wish it was so black and white (excuse the pun). Penguin drops tend to be quite dramatic. What I am trying to describe is almost like a cumulative negative effect of links. Gradual, but negative.

 

[pugyrob]

There are a lot of algorithmic filterslike this where your site will get no traction