

Negative SEO Does Exist - searchmartin
http://webmarketingschool.com/negative-seo-exist/
Last week Matt Cutts said at SMX advanced that negative SEO wasnt a thing.  Rand Fishkin asked for evidence it does.  Well....... hows this?
======
gscott
I have tested negative seo to force a couple of websites out of listing
positions that I had once and it works fine. What you do is buy multiple 50k
"xrumer" postings with "pingbacks" for that website you want gone. Add in some
spammy Fiverr jobs plus buy some links for that website you want gone on Text-
Link-Ads then report that website as having paid links. This method works 100%
of the time. This creates such a firestorm of links a webmaster would have to
spend a month trying to disavow them and a lot of times webmasters don't even
know what disavow means. Google is so worried about spamming and punishing
websites rather then just ignoring the bad data. Since Google is out to punish
and Google... it's a computer program it can't tell one thing from another
other then these junk links exist therefor the hammer must be brought down on
the webmaster who has no idea of what is going on. This was a year or more ago
but I promise that this would work fine today. The smaller the website the
better it works. Try it against a mega website and this would be ineffective
because of the ratio of good links that they have.

~~~
Isofarro
"This method works 100% of the time"

How many sites did you try this on? One?

In your existing setup, how many competitors could you take out now before
Google notices the pattern you've adopted? Take a look at the footprint:

* Site suddenly acquires a new batch of incoming links

* Same site is reported for being a recipient of a paid-for links scheme

* Reporter uses the email address of (your email address here) -- I love the dichotomy of blackhats despising/hating Google, yet reaching out over and over again pretending to be a good citizen.

How many times and variations of that can you come up with before standing
out? And when the pattern emerges, Google are in a position to re-address the
balance.

This switch Google has done from inaction to penalty for spammy links has
changed the spamming game. No positive benefit from spamming is a good thing.
Spammers can only create negative damage with their existing setup, until they
out themselves by being trackable/detectable.

~~~
bjterry
You are being insufficiently creative. If there are 10 competitors in your
niche (and many will have more like 100), you can do this to five of them at
random and google would have no way of determining who the perpetrator was.
When you report them for paid-links, you wouldn't use your real e-mail
address, that doesn't make any sense. There is no way to tell self backlinks
from competitor backlinks. Both are attempted to be carried out in secret and
in identical fashion from google's perspective. I could imagine a scenario
where google sees that a niche has a bunch of people being targeted with
backlinks, and so stops applying the penalty, but still they would have no way
of targeting the bad actor.

~~~
Isofarro
"If there are 10 competitors in your niche (and many will have more like 100),
you can do this to five of them at random and google would have no way of
determining who the perpetrator was."

For a pure blackhat operation, it would simply be the newest competitor.
Blackhatters rarely play the long game, they are used to burn-and-churn
operations. They wouldn't have the patience to keep an unprofitable site
running.

It's harder when it's a white-hat SEOer who is also comfortable wearing a
blackhat-persona, they may have the patience and guile not to make it too
evident. Because they know the long term payoff.

"When you report them for paid-links, you wouldn't use your real e-mail
address, that doesn't make any sense."

And yet, using an email address that has zero previous visibility / fake-name
generated looks suspicious too. Any thing where the sender is mostly anonymous
is suspicious, particularly in answering the motive question. (Particularly
silly would be using a free email provider, for example)

Again, Blackhatters aren't eager to put themselves on Google's radar, or any
public spotlight. Only the naive ones use GMail / Analytics / Webmaster
dashboard. They prefer operating behind the scenes and not drawing attention
to themselves, because they have lots to hide.

It takes a bit of pre-planning, some good organisation, and a lot of patience
to pull off a convincing online profile. Not really the hallmarks of the
typical blackhatter.

Of course, if you're into identity theft, are you really willing to risk it
ratting out a competitor. And you'll be in organised online crime territory

Plus the downside if the rest of the Blackhat community find out you've been
snitching to Google. They may have loose morals and ethics when it comes to
SEO, but they have some semblance of respect-earning.

None of this appeals to the blackhatter, seems an awfully contorted process to
go through each time just to gain one ranking place (per competitor). Because
it's a process that requires contacting a human at Google, it's also not
something that's easily automatable or scriptable. Doesn't entirely fit the
quick rinse and repeat / burn-n-churn of the typical Blackhatter.

Take out the scare-mongering of negative SEO, and examine what's left. Not
much. In the wider picture, it won't even register a blip.

Now, the legal ramifications of someone being caught doing this. Motive and
intent, destruction of business value, clear intent to deceive for financial
gain. How many more elements are needed for this to be fraud?

Blackhatters may have loose morals or ethics, but they also know how to stay
on the right side of the law. And also, not to drift too close towards the
organised crime based operations.

Negative SEO won't be a regular tool for blackhat SEOers; too much risk, too
much effort to pull off more than a handful of times without being spotted.
Organised crime though, for extortion, most likely.

~~~
gscott
You can negative seo a site out of existence in about two hours and for about
$75. It is actually super quick. Once you do it, it can take anywhere from 2
weeks to 2 months for the site to loose it's position or be removed.

Just go to freelancer.com market. Buy several xRumer packages. Now do the same
thing on Fiverr with some other various packages. Now go to Text-Link-Ads and
buy some $8 dollar links and link them to your target website.

Personally, I do not do this except for a couple of years ago when Google
first created negative seo. If you are trying to create backlinks to yourself
it is too risky because Google will penalize you even if you are a small fry.
I just make sure all of the local listings are set up (I only market small
businesses that are local) and then do social marketing. Social marketing is
the new backlinks. They don't last as long as backlinks and it is more effort,
but that is where it pretty much is in my estimation now. To be successful in
Google you can do it with about 10-30 backlinks and social marketing. Things
have changed a lot since the Caffeine update.

~~~
Isofarro
" _You can negative seo a site out of existence in about two hours and for
about $75. It is actually super quick. Once you do it, it can take anywhere
from 2 weeks to 2 months for the site to loose it 's position or be removed._"

This doesn't scale without drawing attention to yourself.

It doesn't scale for an individual SEOer as a repeatable approach to ranking
ahead of your competition. Most likely, it's mutually assured destruction -
SEOers destroying each other, taking their clients with them.

It doesn't scale across the SEO industry. Too many people take this up as a
tool, and the quality of Google search results suffer. That's when Google
takes further action.

The one main way negative SEO back linking survives as a reusable technique is
if it's used in small unnoticeable doses, and doesn't affect the typical
Google user. Because when it does impact mainstream Google users, then Google
takes the next step forward.

If the nightmare scenario materialises where SEOers destroy search quality
results for mainstream users with negative SEO campaigns, Google flips the
"spammy link penalty" off, all those sites affected bounce back immediately.

And then Google will comb through the data they've captured in that time
period, and have an improved idea of what link sources are spammy. Google will
have a much better idea of the network of sites you used (to benefit yourself
before the penalty, and to negatively affect your competition during the
penalty). It will stand out.

SEOers are in a classical prisoners dilemma.

~~~
gscott
I never said the idea was a good one, it's a bad one of course. One which I
don't believe many people are doing thankfully. Myself I am not doing it
because I don't want to reduce the quality of results from adding hundreds of
thousands of spam listings. However, I was angry before about Google's actions
on a site I was managing and acted out. I am calm and rational now.

------
andrenotgiant
I think you need to break your argument into two parts.

1\. People ARE creating spammy links that point to competitor sites in the
hopes of damaging their search rankings. - You have proven this.

2\. As a result of a competitor creating spammy links to your site, your
rankings in Google have been permanently negatively effected. - I don't think
the data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal
causation. Lots of moving parts in Google's algorithm, the internet, your
site...

Did the site get warnings in Webmaster Tools? Did you go through the disavow
links process? How long ago?

~~~
matnewton85
Why are you even arguing with this? Do you have any experience with SEO?

I use negative SEO regularly to drop sites out of the top 10 in Google. I only
target low quality sites that shouldn't be in there anyway, but Google in all
their algorithmic wisdom has ranked them, so... I knock them out.

Low quality 5 page Adsense sites shouldn't outrank actual, legitimate
businesses so it's just a case of click click, BOOM. I never target the actual
competitors of my clients.

Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional
nowadays. It just has to be.

~~~
jacquesm
> Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional
> nowadays.

The fact that you feel you represent the SEO professional community and that
it is part of the standard toolkit to me is proof positive that the whole SEO
community is a morally bankrupt bunch. It's just shades of gray all the way to
'black', parasitic rather than symbiotic and a net negative.

How you guys sleep at night is a mystery to me.

Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

We should be happy you exist so you can correct Google? And the fact that your
paying customers rise accordingly is nothing but an unhappy coincidence?

> I never target the actual competitors of my clients.

A so you're the kind of SEO that as some kind of public service improves the
google index for his own gratification. Sorry, I don't but that for a second.

Absolutely incredible this comment, but thank you for owning up to it.

Feel free to list your customers here so I can make sure to never ever do
business with any of them.

~~~
cm2012
I don't have any skin in the game, but what if we do a thought experiment?

You are a marketer who is running a big physical sign in real life near some
intersection, selling widgets. There are always 10 other signs there. There is
one very overworked official who checks the signs to make sure they aren't
overtly bad for people looking at them.

You notice that two of the signs competing with your client blatantly say that
they sell widgets, that their widgets cure cancer, and that other cancer
treatments are shams. You know that this sign will mislead or annoy people at
the very least, and also that the officials who decide what signs stay up
would probably removed it if they look closer.

It just so happens that you know that the overworked official will look closer
at signs if you put a red flag on them. Putting a red flag on a "good" sign
will make the official look closer but not do anything about it. But if the
official notices the "bad" signs in question, he will probably take them down.

You do it self servingly, of course, but if the signs weren't on the "bad"
side in the first place, then the official wouldn't take it down. It's
arguable that its not immoral to flag those signs - the flag just tells the
overworked official algorithm to look closer and a little more stringently.

\---

To be clear: I don't do negative SEO or anything not 100% white hat in the
little SEO work I do. But applying negative SEO to an otherwise "good website"
is like putting weight concrete on the base of an already huge pillar. It can
really only hurt borderline sites, as defined by Google's rules.

~~~
jacquesm
I like your thought experiment. Check out elsewhere in this thread how it
works in real life. Thought experiments are great when they can teach you a
new insight about how something actually works (for instance, Einstein and the
elevator), but when they describe an alternate reality then they are less
useful.

If you have a problem with signs near an intersection you petition the city
council _without touching the signs by your false-advertising competitors_ ,
but in the real world no flags are placed, but websites are forcibly removed
from the index or pushed down so far that it does not matter. By analogy, you
don't flag the bad signs, you go and burn down the signs by the competition
leaving just your own.

This is one reason that during election times (when the tempers can run quite
high) _removing_ a sign of a political party can come with surprisingly high
penalties.

BTW, if any company engages in false advertising there are other ways to
resolve that.

> I don't have any skin in the game,

and

> I don't do negative SEO or anything not 100% white hat in the little SEO
> work I do.

Are inconsistent.

~~~
Dylan16807
You're doing very strange things to the analogy. To be closer to the real
activities, it's like putting a bunch of red flags _under_ the sign. Nobody
(except the city coucil) actually touches the target sign. Nobody actually
touches the target website. There is no direct attacking going on.

~~~
Fuzzwah
The road is diverted so that people driving on the road can no longer see the
sign.....

~~~
Dylan16807
Google / city council does that. The SEO actor does nothing to the target,
only to influence google.

------
huhtenberg
How can it _not_ exist?

You basically take competitors site and run a standard SEO link farm thing on
it. Google picks it up and punishes the site, done. What am I missing? How can
Google tell the real motive behind detected SEO activity?

~~~
tluyben2
Well the myth is that this will not punish the target site. It's not true
which has been clear for a long time, but Matt insists it is.

~~~
johnward
Matt doesn't want to admit it but we all know it's true. The algorithm
punishes shitty links and they can't tell if those shitty links were generated
by me to increase my ranking or by a competitor trying to harm my ranking.

~~~
makomk
Or even whether the site they're punishing is the real target of the SEO at
all. For example, there are a bunch of spammy "software index" sites that are
basically just lists of free software applications trying to rank highly for
people searching for that kind of software. It appears that Google has been
penalizing the official websites of some of the software listed on those sites
for being linked from lots of spammy sites.

------
viraptor
I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many
people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever
demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most
visible way to make a point that can't be denied.

PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone
would already give it a go by now.

~~~
nekitamo
Negative SEO only consistently works on smaller sites with a small amount of
backlinks (less than 1000). The idea behind negative SEO is to use tools to
build a large amount of spammy links, such that 99% of the link profile of a
site is obvious spam. This is easily achieved with tools like Xrumrer and
Scrapebox. Find a site with 1000 backlinks, build a few hundred thousand
spammy backlinks to it, and watch it drop.

To do the same for mattcutts.com you would have to build hundreds of millions
spam backlinks to "outspam" his millions of legitimate backlinks. This is
nontrivial.

So the people at the mercy of Negative SEO are the people least equipped to
defend themselves: small hobby site owners, webmasters with personal blogs,
small businesses etc. You can easily knock out their sites from the SERPs and
they would never know what happened. Larger sites are secure due to the nature
of their large link profiles.

Personally I think all the fear over Negative SEO has been overblown. I've
personally been able to knock sites out of the SERPs for a year or so, and so
have many other blackhatters. However, people would much rather spend their
precious time and resources improving their own sites to get to the top of the
SERPs rather than knocking out the competition.

I don't think Negative SEO is ok. But I also don't think it's a big deal.

~~~
Isofarro
"So the people at the mercy of Negative SEO are the people least equipped to
defend themselves: small hobby site owners, webmasters with personal blogs,
small businesses etc."

There's a filter you've missed there - those people are only at the mercy of
negative SEO when they stand in the way of an SEO practitioner and financial
gain.

~~~
nekitamo
"those people are only at the mercy of negative SEO when they stand in the way
of an SEO practitioner and financial gain."

In practice this is almost never. If you're SEOing in a small niche it's very
easy to simply outrank the competition if you know what you're doing. It would
take many more resources to knock out the dozen of sites in the SERPs above
you, and even if you did it's not guaranteed that your own site would replace
them.

The only time you would want to knock out your competition with negative SEO
is if you're hovering around 5-10 on a high value high volume keyword, but in
the real world sites that rank for those kinds of keywords have millions of
legitimate backlinks, and it's next to impossible to negative SEO them.

So personally I've never seen a situation in which the time and resources
expended in negative SEO would be justified. Even for reputation management it
makes sense to rank dozens of your own sites rather than knock out all the
"bad" competing site.

~~~
gabemart
> If you're SEOing in a small niche it's very easy to simply outrank the
> competition if you know what you're doing.

Is this really true? I struggle to imagine how generating legitimate and high-
value backlinks is easy, even for a small niche.

~~~
nekitamo
Sadly, spamming backlinks still works fine. You just have to know what you're
doing.

------
johnward
There is no way negative SEO doesn't exist. As long as Google penalizes sites
for link schemes those same schemes could be used against their competitors.

For example, say I'm running xrumer and spamming forums to increase my
ranking, which was common pre-penguin. Google releases penguin and my sites
rankings start to tank. So instead I switch to spamming my competitors links
and Google penalizes them also. Good luck as a site owner trying to remove
thousands of junk forum links especially when the forum owner thinks you were
the spammer.

------
jacquesm
I'm so happy google did this. For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given
a taste of its own medicine.

Let me explain: When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com
I was trying to achieve something positive. I did not realize how infested
geocities had become with spammers, linkfarms and other trash.

Probably at least a few million of the accounts were either compromised or
somehow tricked into placing low value links on their pages at the behest of
SEO types that were engaging in 'scalable link building'. Comment spam and so
on.

Very annoying. And I really did not know what to do about this, it felt wrong
that I'd be contributing to these businesses somehow even in a peripheral way.

And then google decided to penalize 'spammy links'. So the tables are turned.
Not a day passes without some whiny email from some SEO character that is
trying to clean up after their past misdeeds. They try to automate this of
course (imagine that their trickery would no longer scale) so they spam tons
of automated emails to webmasters threatening to use the google disavow tool
because they have been penalized.

So the tables are turned, for a change. Suddenly all those trashy links are
degrading rather than enhancing the stature of these companies and their ill
motivated SEO brethern.

So, I hope this stays, as far as I'm concerned google can shut down the
disavow tool and those that lived by the sword should die by the sword. It's
like an 'own goal' by the bad element in the SEO community.

At the same time google should be _extra_ careful that it does now allow good
websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn
around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to
avoid being penalized by it themselves). Especially since if a competitor
successfully uses google as an offensive weapon that they can remain
unidentified or undetected. (Which makes me wonder about the motives of the OP
not to disclose who this was, it would be a lot easier to verify the story,
and any subsequent retaliation could be dealt with in the same manner.)

But overall this spammy links penalty is a good development.

The disavow tool is used as a threat against webmasters to take _manual_
action to remove the spam that was placed in an _automated_ way by the perps
in the past, that's a really bad balance there.

I'm completely not impressed by these threats for reocities.com I only care
that the content is online. I guess I could replace all the outbound links by
'nofollows' but that would hurt a lot of good sites as well and I really hope
that google can tell the difference between 'good' and 'bad' links in this
respect. (If they can't that would be a huge problem)

edit: the voting on this comment is interesting, 1->+9->+1->+9->+5

Never had a comment oscillate like that.

~~~
tomp
This update doesn't change anything, really, it just reverses the effect;
before, you were paying SEO black-hats to create links to your site, which
should result in elevating your search rank, but now, you will be paying SEO
black-hats to create links to competitors' sites, sinking them in the search
results, and relatively elevating your search rank.

The only thing search engines can do to stop SEO spam is to avoid giving _any_
weight to spammy links.

~~~
wlesieutre
As mentioned in the article, that works if you can identify _every_ spammy
link. Without a penalty, you can make a million spammy links, let the filter
catch 95% of them, and reap the benefits from the ones that get past.

That system isn't exploitable to sabotage another site's rank, but it also
doesn't work at preventing link farms (as evidenced by most Google results
before the recent change).

~~~
rasz_pl
It doesnt take a genius to realize that when you identified 1 million bad
links to XXX, and your database has 1.005 links to XXX, you should look
carefully at the remaining 5K. Cross reference those sources against other
suspicious links and so on.

Basically fight source of bad links, not recipients.

------
drakaal
I do reputation management at
[http://www.blackwaterops.com](http://www.blackwaterops.com) a large portion
of that is "negative" SEO.

It doesn't all have to be "bad neighbor" linking. Negative SEO can be
contacting the people who are lending authority to a link and getting them to
"nofollow" or remove the link.

Negative SEO can also be convincing Google to AutoSuggest things that don't
paint your competition in a good light. "Cheezy Poofs Calories" seems like
things people might ask, but people will reconsider if they want Cheezy poofs
if the top suggestions in Google's autocomplete is "Cheezy Poofs Explosive
Diarrhea" or "Cheezy Poofs Rectum Rash" Or better yet both.

That all Said. Bad Neighbor penalties and the ability to get a site delisted
by link bombing has been well known for a long time. Anything that you could
do to try and get your self upranked but that is sketchy could also be used to
get your competitor delisted.

One thing to note however, is that along the way typically that competitor
gets insane rankings just before getting delisted. That isn't always worth it.

-Brandon Wirtz (I Google Bombed my Way to being Greatest Living American) [http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2007/05/11/the-greatest-goo...](http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2007/05/11/the-greatest-googled-american/)

------
tboyd47
Lobbying Google to reverse course now is surely a lost cause. Google has a
vested interest in improving the user experience of _Google_. Not the
profitability of every other site that has a symbiotic relationship with
Google by optimizing against their ranking system. So even if you do have a
quality site, and they did open a door to allow your competitors to blast you
with bunk backlinks, all this is completely hidden from Google's user base and
so they ultimately don't care.

Maybe what website owners should do here, if they have lost considerable
money, is file a class-action suit against Google. I'd actually be surprised
if no one is doing this.

This is a really interesting subject, anyway. Thanks for the post. I would
love to hear a follow-up about how people with web properties can guard
against negative SEO. Maybe by keeping your site registered under multiple
domains at a time? Or moving your content around on the same domain with
permanent redirects? I dunno, it really seems like this is changing the whole
industry.

------
programminggeek
I think there are two issues at play.

1) Google massively discounted exact match domains, so if you were ranking
well before because of an EMD, don't expect to now.

2) Negative SEO has always been a possibility, but a lot of sites aren't
helping themselves either.

For like a decade now, there have been plenty of shady link networks where you
could get millions of links. It would not be difficult to get millions of spam
links with the same anchor text and make it look like Blue Widgets was
spamming.

It's not important whether a link is spammy or not, it matters if it's helping
you rank better, is being discounted, or if it's penalizing you.

It is possible that those links existed before the Google updates and were
helping blue widgets.com rank better. Then Google discounted the spammy links
and the EMD, and now the site isn't ranking.

It's also possible that Google is penalizing those links.

In the end, spam links don't come with a great big attribution of how they got
there, who put them there, and what the intent is.

A link is a vote. Just like votes, you can stuff the ballot box or you can
make it look like your competitor is stuffing the ballot box.

In the end nobody is entitled to rank well on Google search for any reason at
all. They could order by rand() tomorrow and you're up a creek.

~~~
tiglionabbit
He could check how long the spam sites have existed by using archive.org.

------
nkozyra
If there is a way to be penalized via blackhat SEO there _will always_ be the
possibility of negative / competitive SEO.

------
logicallee
I think there's a very good argument to be made that negative SEO should be
illegal, with punishment/compensation similar to that of slander and libel in
the United States. (Which are incredibly specific, due to free speech issues.)

Why should slander and libel be illegal at all - why can't anyone say, claim,
or publish anything they want whatsoever?

If you reflect on that the reason is fairly obvious.

Likewise, if negative SEO were illegal, it might have the same benefits.

Of course technically the standard would be much different from slander/libel,
but the fundamental reason that we would limit free speech in this way is
clear. It is just more damaging to the person being damaged than the limit on
the free speech that it imposes costs us. (Which is taken seriously in the
United States).

So, for this reason, there is a good argument to be made for specific,
nuanced, laws against negative SEO in the form of civil penalties. I would
support such a law.

~~~
rplnt
You can have that law in US.. and then what?

It might help in some cases, but people doing this probably aren't that stupid
and would use foreign entity to do the dirty work if there was such law in
effect.

------
mattmaroon
I don't understand how negative SEO could not exist. Google is cracking down
on people buying back links right? If I bought links for a competitor's
website, wouldn't it stand to reason they'll be punished? Google has no idea
who is doing the purchasing. (You could replace buying links with any action
Google' algo punishes.)

As long as Google's algorithm has punitive measures in it from something that
happens off of your site, it stands to reason a competitor could do those
things on your behalf.

------
sudorank
Negative SEO has been around for years, the mainstream SEO community have only
just realised it.

It's going to be at-least another year until the exact methods are discovered
though because of the reasons I detailed here:

[http://www.sudorank.com/rand-fishkin-wont-ever-see-
negative-...](http://www.sudorank.com/rand-fishkin-wont-ever-see-negative-seo-
example/)

Until then people's businesses will be burned and Google won't really do much
about it, always slow to react!

------
pistle
Seems the SEO community might need to build a new b2b around punishing the
blackhat SEO folks that attack their clients. SEO can go fight amongst itself
to the death.

------
tambourine_man
We desperately need open and distributed database and search algorithms. As it
stands now, we are at the mercy of a company's competence and benevolence.

Google is getting less usable by the day. Verbatim and code search don't work
anymore and the relevance of results keep decreasing dispite the many revision
animals they release.

------
SeanDav
I am no expert, but logically you could explain this behaviour of apparent
negative SEO by Google discounting all links to "blue widgets" and the sites
that market blue widgets that are now ranking higher, achieve this because of
other links that are not being discounted by Google.

------
J2B2
I worked at an SEO firm that had a range of client sites, including two of the
three companies with the largest search engines. As with every update a large
amount of speculation, with little data analysis, would pop up.

Content, Improper site setup, canonical tags, robot.txt changes, there are a
significant number of issues that can impact rankings.

Unfortunately, instead of checking these owners of the site would always
speculate that the impact was due to some new factor that certain SEO firms
would perpetuate for marketing purposes.

If your to learn anything from these types of articles, its know your audience
and create content for them.

------
jgalt212
Head of Google's Web Spam team is a position with too much power. For those
dealing with Google, that's probably the second most powerful seat (after
Larry/Sergey tie for first).

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. As such, no one person should occupy this
seat for any significant tenure.

This comment is in no way a negative comment about Matt, just talking about
the temptations one must face in such a powerful seat.

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anonymfus
For Google solution could be to penalise only for links placed before the date
of update.

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xor-ed-wolf
This article is enlightening but offers no solutions or advices. Why had I
read that?

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codeddesign
how is this at the top of HN? this news is well over a year old

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vijayaggarwal
black hat SEO 2.0!

