Is there a law against negative seo?

[julian]

or just unethical..

scenario:

Company-A pays Neg-Seo Corp. to take down their main competitor.

 

[Murray]

or just unethical..

scenario:

Company-A pays Neg-Seo Corp. to take down their main competitor.

It's an interesting question I don't know the answer to.

I should also point out I've never seen a successful "negative seo attack"

But I guess the question is still valid even if someone attempts it and fails.

 

[Safeserps]

Negative SEO

It depends what you mean by "Negative SEO".

We have a client that wants a website "removing" from the index for their main brand keyword.

This website is not a competitor site in any way and they are willing to pay a lot for it too happen.

This is still negative SEO yet we will accomplish the task using a "moral" method.

i.e.

Without spamming said site with a billion back-links.

 

[Murray]

It depends what you mean by "Negative SEO".

We have a client that wants a website "removing" from the index for their main brand keyword.

This website is not a competitor site in any way and they are willing to pay a lot for it too happen.

This is still negative SEO yet we will accomplish the task using a "moral" method.

i.e.

Without spamming said site with a billion back-links.

Was that a negative review they wanted off the first page?

I wouldn't call that negative SEO really if you just created social media profiles etc to rank on the first page to push it off.

 

[mally]

I'm sure it could be prosecuted as fraud, as it causes loss (financial), if the person responsible has done it for that reason

Fraud by false representation (Section 2)

The defendant:

made a false representation
dishonestly
knowing that the representation was or might be untrue or misleading
with intent to make a gain for himself or another, to cause loss to another or to expose another to risk of loss.
The offence is entirely focused on the conduct of the defendant.

 

[Safeserps]

Was that a negative review they wanted off the first page?

I wouldn't call that negative SEO really if you just created social media profiles etc to rank on the first page to push it off.

An entire site.

The keyword is way too large for Social Media profiles, this has been tried before, but you have the idea.

 

[retired_member33]

Why not? The industry (Google) has made it totally acceptable to nuke someone out using an (anonymous) spam attack.

Building a quality site with quality backlinks doesn't seems to work these days... A crap site with crap backlinks and spamming all your competitors does..

Don't be evil? Fuck that.

I am waiting on the day where Google starts introducing their Gold/Silver/Bronze packages... Gold: You pay 10k a month and you will be right under the Adwords ads...Silver 5K a month: You will be on page one, somewhere between position 5-10 and Bronze 1k a month : You will be somewhere on page two..

 

[Dextron]

I am waiting on the day where Google starts introducing their Gold/Silver/Bronze packages... Gold: You pay 10k a month and you will be right under the Adwords ads...Silver 5K a month: You will be on page one, somewhere between position 5-10 and Bronze 1k a month : You will be somewhere on page two..

I'll take the Gold package please for 'pay day loans' !

 

[namealot]

Negative seo against a competitor wouldn’t necessarily effect them, wouldn’t guarantee yours site higher listing , you bigger profits or even you taking there place money down the drain like most seo ? Companies do offer the service but think there more full of bull than most seo firms if thats actually possible ? If you deliberately want to attempt to take out a competitor there are far more effective untraceable ways :evil:

 

[kate-brownhill]

Negative SEO (Getting a site penalised) is easily possible on the vast majority of sites. Yes, some mid to top range sites are realistically immune to the normal feeble attempts at negative SEO, but if anyone believes that its difficult or hard for the sites that most of us are involved in, not only are they deluding themselves, but they are also leaving themselves open. We have carried out some test and have dropped our own sites very easily and this was 15 months ago so much easier to do these days. We are continually asked or hinted at requests by a few of our clients and the answer is always the same. No.

Morally, it is completely wrong and in the same league, imho, as vandalising assets of a rival company. Might not be as black or white legally, but the same 'low life' type of action and mentality. Google allowing this to happen, as much as I agree that its a massive blotch on their reputation, is NOT an excuse to go and purposely damage someone's website the same way that your competitor getting that big contract you were after is not an excuse to burn their offices down. Its a ridicules claim to make.

Is it illegal? I would say that you are purposely harming an asset of a company so therefore yes, I presume it is Illegal. Would be interesting in finding out from a legal professional though.

 

[Murray]

Certain "SEO experts" have a vested interest in negative SEO being true.

Negative SEO is a good scapegoat for their own link building naiveness that causes their clients sites to drop or get an unnatural links warning.

It's also a double whammy hiring a incompetent/ and or snake SEO because you pay them for 3 months, they get you a penalty, then they lie about the cause and expect you to pay them to and fix the problem.

It's sad to say, but SEO on the whole is a disgraceful industry.

 

[diggdirectory]

This interesting question but is it really exist
i have doubt on this

 

[max_rk]

Not sure that entirely agree to this but interesting point.

Certain "SEO experts" have a vested interest in negative SEO being true.

Negative SEO is a good scapegoat for their own link building naiveness that causes their clients sites to drop or get an unnatural links warning.

It's also a double whammy hiring a incompetent/ and or snake SEO because you pay them for 3 months, they get you a penalty, then they lie about the cause and expect you to pay them to and fix the problem.

It's sad to say, but SEO on the whole is a disgraceful industry.

 

[Murray]

Not sure that entirely agree to this but interesting point.

I've seen is done first hand to a friends site last year

An SEO company built keyword footer links on expired domains (not sure they could of been anymore obviously unnatural with their link building if they tried) and got them an unnatural links warning.

The SEO company then blamed some links from dmoz clones and twitter scrapper sites being the problem (the kind of links that every site gets + they were NoFollow anyway)

Also the unnatural links warning looked like this

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole

So it wasn't affecting the sites ranking anyway (even though of course it is prudent to remove suspicious links to avoid future issues)

The SEO company got them the unnatural links warning, then wanted to be paid to clean up their own mess.

99% of "SEO experts" are at best clueless or at worst snake oil salesman.

 

[martin-s]

"Negative SEO" is a much bandied about phrase. But you only have to flip the phrase on its head to see that it's very much possible.

Instead of "is negative SEO real?", ask "will black hat SEO techniques put my rankings at risk?"

Clearly smaller sites with less established footprints are most at risk - but that includes probably 95% of the sites out there.

 

[donton]

One of my sites got hosed with spam links recently.

It was kind of annoying, especially as I'd paid quite a lot of money for the domain name that was hit. I also spent quite a while building up a few decent back links to the domain from respected sites. It's one of those things I thought I'd have to live with.

Today I noticed some referral traffic from Fiverr - I followed it up and the guy's username was contained in the referral URLs.

Having done some sleuthing, he seems to have been buying a few XRumer/negative SEO gigs on Fiverr, so I'm guessing that's where all the spam directed at my site has come from.

What kind of recourse do I have, and who can I report this w*nker to?

(I don't expect any of you to know the answer to that question... but if you do, I'm all ears!)

 

[max_rk]

One of my sites got hosed with spam links recently.

It was kind of annoying, especially as I'd paid quite a lot of money for the domain name that was hit. I also spent quite a while building up a few decent back links to the domain from respected sites. It's one of those things I thought I'd have to live with.

Today I noticed some referral traffic from Fiverr - I followed it up and the guy's username was contained in the referral URLs.

Having done some sleuthing, he seems to have been buying a few XRumer/negative SEO gigs on Fiverr, so I'm guessing that's where all the spam directed at my site has come from.

What kind of recourse do I have, and who can I report this w*nker to?

(I don't expect any of you to know the answer to that question... but if you do, I'm all ears!)

You could ask lawyer to send him heavy worded letter, people do get frightened with the prospect of possible outcome and agree to go with demands.

End of the day I think it would be very difficult to prove anything like that in a court room.

Also is it really worth the effort?

I wonder what is the big G view on this.

 

[donton]

You could ask lawyer to send him heavy worded letter, people do get frightened with the prospect of possible outcome and agree to go with demands.

End of the day I think it would be very difficult to prove anything like that in a court room.

Also is it really worth the effort?

I wonder what is the big G view on this.

I'd have to get a lawyer to extract his personal information from Fiverr first I suspect. Of course, he might have referenced my site in a private message for a completely different reason - I might just be jumping to conclusions.

Providing a lawyer could get that information, it'd be very easy to prove indeed just by going through his previous purchases on the site.

Is it worth the effort? Probably not. That said, I'd written off the site as a no-hoper up until today as a result of the spammy links - but I'd love to catch the person responsible.

Google doesn't really care - their official line on negative SEO is to use the disavow tool. I've done so thus far and not experienced any drop in rankings, but I'm finding it hard to keep on top of the hundreds of new links being blasted to it every day. Their official stance doesn't help people out if they're in the cross-hairs of a big spam blast, in my opinion.

I will make a few calls in the morning and see where I stand, but I suspect there's still not much I can do without incurring hefty bills from a lawyer.

 

[Murray]

One of my sites got hosed with spam links recently.

I would be interested to know more if that's ok.

Has it had a negative affect on your rankings? or wasn't the site ranking for anything yet anyway (since you say it's new) & if it isn't ranking yet why do you think they would know about it/bother to spam it

Also what anchor text did they use?

 

[donton]

I would be interested to know more if that's ok.

Has it had a negative affect on your rankings? or wasn't the site ranking for anything yet anyway (since you say it's new) & if it isn't ranking yet why do you think they would know about it/bother to spam it

Also what anchor text did they use?

The site has been online around one year (near enough to the day), so it's not particularly new. It ranked well for a number of fairly competitive phrases.

Since the attack started rankings have gained slightly for certain terms - but the site's link profile has bulged to five or six times its original size in the space of one week.

What goes up must come down, there's no way it will hold its rankings with thousands of crappy links pointed to it. There's a lot of snitching in this particular niche, another site I own was manually penalised after some clown blasted it with keyword rich forum links (less than 20 links, but still enough for Google to slap a manual penalty on it, after someone reported it.) I think that's probably what's going to happen here (although I'm disavowing the crap links on a bi-daily basis.)

Most of the links that are being spammed at it are just the URL (no anchor) - but some have been built using about 10 high competition keywords together like this: "kw1 | kw2 | kw3 | kw4 | kw5" etc.

Why would someone bother to spam it? I have no idea. Envy perhaps? I'm genuinely not sure. It's an EMD and it cost me quite a lot to acquire, which makes it all the more annoying.