Join them - or wait.....

[cc976a]

In my niche I have been doing some quite extensive backlink profiles - trying to see why the Top 10 are where they are, and why I am not!

Every single one of the Top 10 in my niche are where they are through paid directory listings. Fake purchased sites (that are so damn obvious) and same-network links.

This has been the case for a long time. I was the only one penalised in the Sept update, and yet I was the only one who didn't do it!

So - do I join them, or do I still sit it out and hope when the new changes come in along in they all get booted and banned and I jump back up again? (I have been waiting months!)

For a two week period in April I jumped up to 1st place (with no extra work on my part, no change in site or backlink profile). I hope this is G's testing and sign of things to come.....

.......but would you go down the same road?

 

[GreyWing]

For a two week period in April I jumped up to 1st place (with no extra work on my part, no change in site or backlink profile). I hope this is G's testing and sign of things to come.....

.......but would you go down the same road?

I think you will have found that the dodgy competitors will have blacklisted your sites when they seen you appeared. Negative SEO is killing Google, you can't rank in a these dodgy niches for more than a week or so. When I say dodgy, I mean where the dodgy sites want to rank not the actual sector.

It doesn't matter what you do mate, they will make that choice for you if you appear. Google is a dead duck for searching for competitive niches, great for technical searches but I would never buy anything out of it.

Scam city and it's rewarding scams more and more. To blacklist for negative seo was asking for trouble.

 

[Murray]

Negative SEO is killing Google, you can't rank in a these dodgy niches for more than a week or so. .

I've never seen/heard of a successful negative SEO attack.

To be fair I've been busy with other things the last few months (domains ) so I haven't been keeping my ear to the ground and visiting SEO forums as much as I used to In previous years.

Have you got any links to case studies where negative SEO attacks have been successful?.

 

[GreyWing]

I know of loads that have been successful mate (or rather they claim they got hit by negative seo, I believe them as to do that to yourself would have been stupid), been on the wrong end of a good few of them.

Rob Prime from here wrote about his sites last year, http://www.seobook.com/pre-negative-seo

The finance industry is full of sites that have been whacked... I've withdrawn my stuff out of google, I can't be bothered working round them so I have banned GoogleBot from all my sites. Least then, if I grow a business I can do so without fear of one day having to lay off 70% of my staff because Matt Cutts gets out the wrong side of bed.

Sure I am missing out, but I justify it by knowing at least I'm not living in fear of any anything. Sometimes when you ban it, your site still ranks though. I have tried to get one of my sites out and Google keeps bloody ranking it.

 

[FWSJay]

Are many of the sites owned by one person?
Do the links match very closely, or just from the same 'sort' of places?
Are they all ranking for a range of key phrases in the niche?

 

[Murray]

Rob Prime from here wrote about his sites last year, http://www.seobook.com/pre-negative-seo

Oh yes I saw that.

I thought at the time that he did it to himself as a publicity stunt.

Very clever really, thinking outside the box, hats off to him.

 

[cc976a]

I have been keeping an eye on my backlinks but never noticed any negative SEO attacks - I was looking, unless I've missed something untoward.

A couple have purchased directory type network links who place your site on 10 other related directories, but most of it is crap (the type of stuff Matt Cutts says they're tackling) - the only negative SEO attack on everyone on the first page all backlinked from the same redirect page - we are all victims I guess, but all equally in the same boat.

Only 1 site has a credible link, so I guess they earn their top spot but its just damn crazy!

Just got in mind to join them now and earn as much as I can before G find out!

 

[Murray]

Just got in mind to join them now and earn as much as I can before G find out!

Why don't you create another site in the same niche.

Build as many links (spam or not) to the new site and try and get it to rank quickly.

In the meantime concentrate on quality links for the existing site.

Hopefully by the time google gets to devaluing the new spam site the existing quality site will be ranking and stable to replace It.

 

[cc976a]

Good thinking - this was my next move!!

 

[cc976a]

Thing is there is one simple answer but G in their greed on Adwords won't do it.......simply do not apply any juice to a crap link, zero nah-dah

Negative SEO attacks would cease overnight....but of course then less people paying on Adwords to support their loss in revenue!

 

[xstu74]

If you have left it this long id suggest sitting out till the next penguin update, i wouldn't risk the site at this point so close to the latest barrage of updates.

 

[Jamie101]

If you have left it this long id suggest sitting out till the next penguin update, i wouldn't risk the site at this point so close to the latest barrage of updates.

Agree 100% with this. The next update is literally around the corner so if I were you I'd wait to see if the update helps you (ie. getting rid of the spammy sites). If it doesn't then it might be time to consider joining them.

 

[dashu1]

Thing is there is one simple answer but G in their greed on Adwords won't do it.......simply do not apply any juice to a crap link, zero nah-dah

Negative SEO attacks would cease overnight....but of course then less people paying on Adwords to support their loss in revenue!

They're playing a dangerous game though don't you think?

Adwords just doesn't work for many businesses, it's too flipping expensive, and so people who do get negatively whacked can't switch to Adwords instead, they just go bust.

Initially it might be webmasters who get fed up with Google, but you're over a barrel in the beginning because most searchers still use Google, it won't be until the searchers decide that the results are crap too that Google will suffer.

And when that happens I imagine they'll start trying to back peddle like hell, but I think it'll be too late and it'll serve them right as well.

No company is too big to fail and Google do keep on cocking things up no matter how many Phd's they have - the latest Google service to bite the dust is Google Wallet, yet another one that hasn't worked out.

And they're still hammering away at their golden egg, trying desperately to smash it up.

 

[pugyrob]

Oh yes I saw that.

I thought at the time that he did it to himself as a publicity stunt.

Very clever really, thinking outside the box, hats off to him.

Lol i wish i was that smart it was a real negative SEO case but i tried to turn it into a positive thing. The site ranks well now but who knows what Google will do. There was a second wave of negative SEO which helped my ranking so far but again time will tell.

My case aside, i know many many cases of negative SEO working and shutting down businesses and sites. It is not hard to do and if you can screw your own site, someone can surely do it to you as well!

 

[cc976a]

They're playing a dangerous game though don't you think?

Adwords just doesn't work for many businesses, it's too flipping expensive, and so people who do get negatively whacked can't switch to Adwords instead, they just go bust.

Initially it might be webmasters who get fed up with Google, but you're over a barrel in the beginning because most searchers still use Google, it won't be until the searchers decide that the results are crap too that Google will suffer.

And when that happens I imagine they'll start trying to back peddle like hell, but I think it'll be too late and it'll serve them right as well.

No company is too big to fail and Google do keep on cocking things up no matter how many Phd's they have - the latest Google service to bite the dust is Google Wallet, yet another one that hasn't worked out.

And they're still hammering away at their golden egg, trying desperately to smash it up.

Yes completely agree. Unfortunately though its just us website owners that realise it. The general Joe Bliggs on the street has absolutely no concept of what's going on.

They don't know that results are no longer independent (I.e credit card search) no idea that some of the results they click - which they believe G are finding for them on good merit and trust - are actually paying G the most.

The keyword I'm targeting has just under 5k exacts (and know this to be true) I'm 2nd in both Yahoo and Bing but they hardly drive any traffic to me. In fact if I lost those positions I don't think it would harm revenue in a noticeable way. This is how reliant we are on G - and as you mention Adwords is too expensive (if be operating on a loss - which is how some businesses are preventing barriers from entering market when SEO isn't working)

Tried other forms of marketing / advertising but not finding many bringing a ROI (and my conversions are on par with industry).

Think we're all waiting for the day that another big boy steps up - but I have to say, unless a big media shift, we're looking at 5-10 years

 

[Murray]

Lol i wish i was that smart it was a real negative SEO case but i tried to turn it into a positive thing. The site ranks well now but who knows what Google will do. There was a second wave of negative SEO which helped my ranking so far but again time will tell.

My case aside, i know many many cases of negative SEO working and shutting down businesses and sites. It is not hard to do and if you can screw your own site, someone can surely do it to you as well!

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.

 

[pugyrob]

Negative Seo exists very much, I can't think this is even debatable on any good Seo forum.

Some sites are bullet proof due to huge authority but these are few and far between. If you can over optimise your link profile and get nuked for it, someone else can do it easily for you.

Take a new emd and I will build 50 one way links to it with emd anchor only.then see where it ranks in 2 months Time and how easy you find getting it back. If I built 20,000 it gets harder to clean up.

This is rife in highly competitive niches. Negative Seo can ;

1) draw attention to a grey/black link profile getting a site nuked by a manual check or tripping anchor filters

2) over optimise a sites anchor text tripping an emd, penguin or manual penalty or all three.

3) reduce a sites overall trust making it harder to rank and making the value of new links much less.

Also not all unnatural link profiles get warnings in webmaster tools. Under 50 percent for sure.

Bottom line, negative Seo works on sites with little authority, new sites or sites already having trust issues. Matt cutts blog, amazon, google.com etc are not representative of the web as a whole.

Don't want to go too deep into this but to say negative Seo does not exist is one of the most incorrect quotes I have read on here...I know of a few members on here in competitive niches that have had sites killed by it.

 

[Murray]

Bottom line, negative Seo works on sites with little authority, new sites or sites already having trust issues.

How would you define new?

What I think of as new couldn't rank naturally in anything mildly competitive very quickly, and if it's not ranking to begin with it couldn't really be hit.

Sites with existing rankings built on spam you could potentially help along the way, but they were always heading for trouble anyway.

If you build on a foundation of strong authority links, (which you need to do because sooner or later an algorithm or a manual penalty will get you) then there is nothing a negative link building attacks can do.

 

[pugyrob]

New meaning really that they had not had a chance to gain many good quality links.

A site with a few links however could be PREVENTED from ranking which is certainly negative to that site and negative Seo. The few links factor also applies to most small businesses online who don't need huge links to rank but could have some nasty competitors

Most sites online do not have the authority links that make them immune to negative Seo. Probably 99%.

There are many ways to take down a site. I've not done it but it is not rocket science. Yes i can't take out matt cutts blog though I give you that.

 

[Murray]

New meaning really that they had not had a chance to gain many good quality links.

A site with a few links however could be PREVENTED from ranking which is certainly negative to that site and negative Seo.

Who is wasting their time finding these new sites that aren't ranking yet and probably never will anyway?

Then wasting even more time trying to make sure they never rank..

Doesn't make any rational sense to me and their time would be much more constructively spent on promoting their own site.

The few links factor also applies to most small businesses online who don't need huge links to rank but could have some nasty competitors

Well if it's so easy to rank in their niche, again why would anyone bother trying to knock other people out? when it would be easier just ranking their own site.

I just try and think about everything rationally, and negative SEO through link building doesn't seem to add up + neither have I seen any believable evidence for it.

Even so It's interesting to hear your opinions and thanks for sharing your thoughts.