
How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit - mehulkar
http://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2014/02/how-google-nuked-sports-media-watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-commit/
======
sharkweek
Sounds algorithmic and not manual.

A lot of the junk in the trunk of a once-spammmy domain is hard to chase off.
It's always important to complete due diligence when buying a seemingly
authoritative domain.

From the horse's mouth:

[http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-
dom...](http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-
domain-17883.html)

Personally I think Google should figure out a way to wipe clean a domain's
history when it transfers owners, but... that creates an incentive to spam the
shit out of a domain and then just "transfer ownership" once it's hit with a
penalty. Kind of a hard problem to solve, but an important one. I imagine
someone like my dad, not knowing the first thing about the internet, wanting
to set up a small site for his business. I picture him trying to buy a domain
that matches his business name or something, and then never getting out of the
gutter due to past damage to the domain. Not really fair to him (maybe this is
a bit of an edge case, I dunno).

I think you'll find a thorough re-inclusion request here will likely help but
won't completely bring a recovery (but seriously, make it as thorough as
possible, including disavowing every link you didn't build).

Disavowing "dozens" of links is not exactly hard work - I've had people ask
for help disavowing THOUSANDS of links their ex-agencies had pointed at their
site.

~~~
leephillips
The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a
reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what
happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published
this): [http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/](http://lee-
phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/)

~~~
datathis
Good post but I wish it had a date on it -- hard to know if recent or 5 years
ago. Am I just not seeing the date?

~~~
leephillips
No, I neglected to date it. As far as I can tell from my notes it's from Jan.
20, 2012.

------
trevin
This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that
is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site).

Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they
blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the
small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO
firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name?

I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically
flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of
their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very
limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You
have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the
public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts
(RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but
there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by
Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO.

Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin
update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO
closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner
has any idea.

1:
[https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/420165509296844800](https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/420165509296844800)
2: [http://www.seobook.com/spam-big-or-die](http://www.seobook.com/spam-big-
or-die)

~~~
puranjay
Negative SEO is a _very_ real thing. You can buy links off black hat forums
that are specifically advertised to help knock off your competition.

It's the same with other social media as well. Want to get one of your
competitor's fledgling Facebook pages banned? A service will spam out the page
link in FB comments for a few dollars. Then when the FB mods come calling, the
onus of proving innocence becomes your responsibility.

The ease with which you can spam and hack your competitors online is becoming
a little frightening.

~~~
danielweber
It was one of the first casualties of the anti-spam wars. Completely
uninvolved people found themselves on the wrong end of this one:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job)

------
Guvante
One thing I don't see anyone mentioning is why Google ignores the 404 and
still applies the penalty.

PageRank is fully automated, and probably probes pages very frequently. If you
let a 404 remove a penalty, people could probably occasionally 404 Google's
crawler and see if it helps their rank to automatically remove poorly
performing backlinks.

~~~
rhizome
Google probably sees a 404 penalty remover as technically onerous. It also
wouldn't prevent an arms race of spamming ephemeral links, where if the
spammer wasn't required to switch domains all the time they'd be able to just
stay 4hrs ahead of Google crawler and create a business model oriented around
a 4hr link lifetime.

------
jgmmo
You didn't do your research. Your domain had a spam history.

Also, a simple backlink analysis from any SEO would have turned up these
issues and then you could have promptly disavowed them and be done with it.

It's not Google's fault that you didn't dot you i's and cross your t's as a
webmaster.

~~~
peapicker
It is Google's fault that their pagerank algorithm isn't sophisticated enough
to handle understanding that internet domain ownership isn't static, and for
not understanding that spam sites pointing to 404s on another site are a prime
indication that a change has happened.

~~~
revelation
Spammers are certainly able to have the whois data on a domain changed. It's
simply a catch 22 for Google.

------
unreal37
My friend, I sympathize with you. But surely you can email those webmasters in
at most 30-45 minutes with requests to remove those links, give it a week, and
then do the disavow tool? Is it not worth it to spend 2 hours to rescue your
site that you care so much about?

RapGenius was able to do this in a few hours and they had THOUSANDS of bad
backlinks. They even published their source code for automating it.

You gotta try. Good luck!

~~~
SteveGerencser
If those links point to pages that do not exist because they were part of the
previous owner's website, why should he have to hunt down each instance of an
old link and ask to have it removed? Never mind the fact that we are seeing as
much as 80% ignore rate on removal requests these days.

We are seeing more an more of this. I've seen messages from 'Google' with
sample links that need to be removed that are from domains that no longer
exist. How can you remove a link the Google claims is causing you harm when
that domain no longer exists?

The best solution has always been for Google to simply ignore links that it
does not approve of and move on. Instead they have chosen the path of
penalizing many websites in an effort to 'clean up' a problem that they were
instrumental in creating (PR Toolbar anyone?). The collateral damage tends to
be irrelevant to many at Google because search tends to be considered a zero
sum game. When one site moves down another moves up.

------
iancarroll
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2014/02/how-
google-nuked-sports-media-watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-commit/)

------
janesvilleseo
I had a site that was hacked. Over 250k links were built. They were pointing
to a new page on the site. We found out about the hack via Google Webmaster
Tools. They sent a notice it was a malware issue.

We cleaned up the hack and 404 the page. To this day, there are still over
100k links that Google says is out there.

The nice part is, there is no indication of any negative action taken by
Google.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This suggests one could work around the Google penalty by having the bad-links
(PHPBB forums in the OP) link to malware pages.

I think you'd call that a high-risk strategy however.

------
robomartin
At the same time the real concern for legitimate businesses is the potential
for adversaries to use massive spam backlinking to destroy your online
presence. Are Google algo's smart enough to not ding you for what you did not
do? Probably not. It would almost be trivially easy to destroy a domain this
way.

~~~
atourgates
I was sitting in a meeting just the other week where this came up. We were
giving our spiel about how there aren't really any shortcuts that work long-
term with SEO, and if you pay someone $20 to create 1,000s of spammy
backlinks, Google will notice and you'll be severely penalized for it.

So the CEO of the company pipes up and says, "What's to stop me from paying
$20 to have someone to create 1,000s of spammy back-links to our competitor's
site?"

I'm shocked that this hasn't become a more common or publicized tactic. I
can't imagine how you'd trace it, and the way things are right now, all the
burden of proof and cleanup is on the site owner.

They could certainly disavow the links, but it seems like you could pretty
easily and cheaply become a pain in the ass of just about any small to medium
site on the internet.

~~~
robomartin
In the real world business can be war. I have personally experienced a major
competitor bribing my top resellers to not feature my product at major
tradeshows (a friend on the inside showed me the emails). I've also had a
major multinational attempt to keep me off my own booth at a trade show by
filing a false temporary restraining order against me (thrown out by a judge
who got amazingly angry at the attorney and corporate rep for misusing the
law). They did this because I was absolutely kicking their ass with better
technology and I was very vocal about it (I was stupid).

Anyhow, my point is that if you don't do it there's always a chance they will
do it to you. That's the main reason to still play the patent game: protection
from bad actors.

Spending $20 per month to destroy your competitor's inbound lead generation
channel would be brilliant and very effective. Is it ethical? I'll let
philosophy majors deal with that. Until you've been the subject of truly
underhanded business tactics by an adversary far more financially poweful than
you could ever be you don't really understand the dark side of the business
world.

The only reason I would not tend to do something like this is that it could
have pretty serious legal implications. IANAL yet I can imagine a potential
twist that could turn something like that into a defamation lawsuit or worst.
A small company would be really foolish to even attempt this. A large
corporation, on the other hand, has the resources to make this sort if thing
happen and avoid being connected to it.

------
tzs
I had a similar thing happen on my personal site, also due to phpBB2. The bad
guys used an exploit in phpBB2 to upload a bunch of images of ads for cheap
drugs and male enhancement products, and then they spammed links to those
images to websites and in email.

I have no idea if Google noticed or cared, because I had nothing on my site
that I expected people to find via search. I did have one page, some analysis
I wrote on how to beat a particular puzzle, that was #1 on searches for how to
beat that puzzle on both Google and Bing, and it stayed #1 [1].

[1] It's pretty funny. The page is just a simple page of mostly text, with
some tables. No attempt has been made to optimize for search. There are very
few incoming links, and one outgoing link (to a domain that once had an online
version of the puzzle in question, but whose registration lapsed and is now
owned by a noodle soup chain). I posted maybe one or two links to the page in
comments I made on discussions of that puzzle a dozen years ago, and have done
no other promotion of it. Yet for over a decade, it has been #1 on Google and
Bing for searches on how to beat that puzzle. I have no idea why. (I have not
named the puzzle or linked to the page here because I do not want to do
anything that might disturb the situation. I'm curious to see how long it
stays #1 without any promotion).

~~~
npsimons
This is the way search _should_ work, and it only goes to show how well Google
is doing it. People shouldn't _have_ or even _want_ to do SEO, they should
just make great content and wait for their rankings.

------
PaulHoule
The real trouble here is that this risk kills investment in developing new and
better web sites.

Want to make a better competitor to w3schools? Good luck. It takes just one
screw up and all the hard work and money you put into it go down the drain.
Practically anybody who makes web sites for profit today has to look at it the
way a black hat does because you're going to get treated like a black hat.

------
TrainedMonkey
Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /2014/02/how-google-nuked-sports-media-
watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-commit/ on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
ErrorDocument to handle the request.

~~~
mehulkar
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2014/02/how-
google-nuked-sports-media-watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-commit/)

------
genericuser
It seems like investigating the history of a domain before you buy it, and if
it has a negative history either not buying it or ensuring you fix the issues
with it would be considered, good practice. It seems like if you do not do
that you have yourself largely to blame. Similar to buying a house that was
built on the location of previous toxic spill, or that had lead paint, or is
haunted.

------
mkaziz
Site isn't loading for me.

~~~
bronson
Me neither. Luckily it's in tha cloud:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MnfiX2B...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MnfiX2BhbcUJ:www.sportsmediawatch.com/2014/02/how-
google-nuked-sports-media-watch-for-a-crime-it-did-not-
commit/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
puranjay
It's a little ironic that the only way I can read a rant against Google
through a caching service provided by Google

------
zarpwerk
It looks as though there are a lot links pointing to the homepage from
blogrolls which might be causing problems too - especially as he admitted he
was selling links from his sidebar?

And you can see the 50% drop in traffic here
[http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-
indicator/?url=sp...](http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-
indicator/?url=sportsmediawatch.com&semdb=us)

------
spinlock
I just wanted to say thanks for posting this. I'm not into seo at all so I'm
exactly the kind of person who could get blindsided by backlinks. It sucks you
bought a bad domain but sharing the experience with hn is a good public
service. Thanks.

------
jaredmck
It seems worrisome that 60% of their text links are blogroll links - I'm not
sure the stated penalty is all that's going on here.

------
IMJacobKing
Woa woa woa, let's pump the brakes, you are misdirecting this. Of all the
innocent victims Google takes on a daily basis, both algorithmically and
manually, you are not one of them.

YOU made a mistake by not thoroughly researching the new domain before buying
and moving your site. It's essential to check the history on a domain before
purchasing and dumping all our eggs into a new basket, which for you was an
unknown basket full of the previous owner's spam.

Archive.org, ahrefs.com, domaintools.com << Not hard to determine a domains
past history even for a novice, just using archive.org and the free versions
of ahrefs and domaintools.

The only person to blame is you my friend, purchasing that domain and 301ing
your old site sealed your own fate. So you're really just wasting everyone's
time with a bunch of wining and pulling the big bad evil Google muwhahaha
card.

For once, I'm on Google's side here. Party's over everyone, move along.

