
What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video] - fryed7
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-expect-in-seo-in-the-coming-months/
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halcyondaze
Black hatters these days don't really even care about long-term rankings,
they're more about exploiting the inadequacies in the algorithm in the first
month or so of a site's live. Build it, rank it, bank cash, and burn it out.
That's the modus operandi right now...I don't see this update changing much of
that.

It's going to be great for those of us building out quality sites though!

~~~
austenallred
Exactly. If you really want to know what black-hatters do and how they get
around Google's filters, here it is:

1\. Buy a ton of domains 2\. Put up picture-based landing pages on those
domains. The user only really sees pictures. 3\. Put up or spin content with
relevant keywords, put it underneath the images. Google only sees a couple
pictures (it doesn't know what they are) and a bunch of really relevant
content. 4\. Build a shiz-ton of links. This is where black hatters really
make their money. I usually build about 125,000 links/day from completely
legit sites, and to Google it pretty much looks like it's going viral. If you
know where to get the links, know how to generate the content, and can make
them seem human, Google has a really hard time finding you. 5\. Link the
landing pages to your money site using affiliate links. 6\. Wait until your
site gets manually reviewed and pulled down.

So any somewhat decent black-hatter will have hundreds of sites in the works
at any given time. The worry of taking a site down isn't a big one, even
though if you take down one site a black-hatter's traffic could drop 3,000
visits/day. The sites I work on usually remain up for an average of 6 months
at a time, and the only way for them to be caught is a manual review. Some
only stay up for a couple weeks, but some stay up for years. There have been
times when landing pages are getting a couple thousand visits a day but I
haven't had time to go back through and redirect the traffic to the money site
or update them from the generic landing page.

Since all of the actions taken mimic closely enough what humans would do, it's
really difficult to be caught by webspam teams.

~~~
necubi
While I appreciate you sharing this, I'm shocked that you would do it from
your real account. Don't you feel any shame for your actions?

~~~
austenallred
Eh, a little bit. I'm not in the black-hat world anymore, and I'm pretty sick
of people pretending like they're magicians or rocket scientists because they
can rank something. Google has a system, you beat the system, that's it.

In my mind it's really difficult to differentiate between what most people
call "white-hat" SEO and what I used to do ("black-hat"). White hat SEO (which
is basically posting links in forums, blog comments, etc.) is trying to
manipulate Google's search engine manually, black-hat is automating it and
doing it at scale.

~~~
a5seo
Eh, I disagree with your definition of "white hat SEO".

White hat is about earning links. A arms length third party has to give you a
link for it to count.

That means it has a lot more to do with Public Relations than Page Rank.

If you drop a link yourself in a forum or blog comment, that's fundamentally
NOT white hat. That's just non-automated black hat. That's also been below
Google's radar.

This is the fundamental problem with SEO... People like you and me who are
arguably 'experts' disagree about these definitions.

Ignorant clients hear "forums links are white hat" and reasonably extrapolate
that "automated forum links are just scalable white hat SEO." And then they
get into trouble.

I've seen it happen at some very well-funded startups. The marketing team
looks like geniuses... for a while. Until they get nailed, then they claim
they were tricked by a black hat SEO firm.

~~~
austenallred
Fair enough, but if forum links aren't white hat then 99% of SEO
companies/freelancers are black hat. I have yet to hear an SEO company say
"We'll make your product great enough people will link to it organically."

~~~
snowwrestler
There's a pretty big gap between forum links and nothing.

A websticker program, for instance, that is marketed via actual direct contact
with potentially valuable partners, can provide high-quality in-bound links
that are voluntary and durable. True, this works better in B2B than B2C. For
B2C, an affiliate or discount program can do similar things. These can be
supported by advertising as well.

These sorts of programs take a commitment, though. You're not going to make a
quick big splash this way. But they do work over time, particularly since
Google values age in both domains and inbound links.

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tlogan
This negative SEO is _huge_ problem now and I'm concern about it.

What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They
don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of
"panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And
whola.... competition is toasted...

I hope this is going to be fixed somehow.

EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" or real problem?

~~~
trevin
It's a real problem. I do SEO for a living and work with hundreds of sites at
a large agency. I've seen several hit with negative SEO from competitors
ordering link gigs on Fiverr or asking some low quality link provider on
Digital Point to build 10,000 links in a short period of time.

This has killed rankings for a few sites that I've worked with. It is really
easy to get thousands of spam/porn sites to link to a competitor with exact
match anchor text for whatever keyword you want. And it's basically impossible
to figure out which competitor is doing it to you.

Google used to just 'devalue' all crap links pointing to a site. A link could
never hurt you. Now that links can hurt your site, it's totally wide open for
this type of thing to happen.

Here's a good case study/experiment done on negative SEO if anybody is
interested in further reading:
[http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-
seo-...](http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-
study/)

~~~
jcampbell1
The pendulum has definitely swung the other way. It is now much easier to kill
competitors with black hat tactics than it is to promote a business with black
hat tactics.

I remember a comment by Eric Schmidt that the best way to combat spam was
through "brands". While brands are a component of good search results, I can't
think of a more misguided philosophy. If the only advice Google has about
where to buy something is to buy from "Amazon" then Google has lost its
utility in revenue generating searches. I think the best way to combat SEO
spam is through engineering and hard work. Giving all the power to established
brands is a shortcut that will ultimately undermine Google's core value to its
users.

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programminggeek
I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as
a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big
economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links.

As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that
the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links
in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics, etc.

~~~
mtgx
How would you solve it then? By putting more focus on social media? They are
doing that, too, but that can be even more easily abused sometimes. Google can
distinguish between the less spammy and the more spammy links anyway, but it's
a hard problem, so they can distinguish it to a certain agree.

But Google's algorithm by now is certainly more complex than "giving each link
a vote". A lot of SEO is on-page SEO, too, so it doesn't depend all on links.

It also seems they will be focusing more on "author rank", which means posts
written by "popular" authors (whatever that means in Google's algorithm) will
more easily rank in Google than those written by less "popular" authors.

~~~
bradleyjg
When google first started, or more accurately when Brin and Page were first
working on PageRank, much of the content of the web was still written by
hobbyists and professors. Sure there were web-rings and the like, but by and
large putting together a page was a manual labor of love and linking was a
personal endorsement.

Now the function of a link has changed entirely. Many of them don't even exist
to be clicked, and many of those that do are either advertising or the
functional equivalent.

There are a few places where a link really is still an endorsement: for
example if I put together a hacker news comment that links a blog post I think
is informative. Or a (genuine) blogger that writes about a topic.

However, anytime there's a useful signal to be found in something like that
the SEO jerks come and flood it. That's why we've got comment spam, we have
reddit sock-puppets, we've got blogvertisments and so on.

And the so-called white hat SEOs aren't much better in this regard. They are
pushing their clients to go write mediocre "content" that is largely
duplicative of what's already out there. People should only be writing content
if they have something -- preferably interesting and/or informative -- to say,
not because it means more people will visit their brochureware site, and
certainly not as a means of getting (tricking?) people to click on no-value-
add affiliate links or AdSense ads. That's putting the cart before the horse.

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bmac27
Nothing too interesting IMO except the increased advertorial crackdown,
although I'm skeptical as to how much of that they'll be able to detect.
(Ironically, I'm seeing more & more of these in A/B level tech blogs)

~~~
ZanderEarth32
I'm guessing their ability to identify a paid advertorial is going to come
down to educated guesses. With their failure to identify sites using other
blatant spamming and black hat tactics, I don't have much faith that they will
be able to get this right.

Unfortunately, the result will be a lot of sites playing within the rules
getting unfairly penalized, just like Panda and Penguin.

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nulluk
If matt says it's more substantial than penguin 1.0 then its going to have a
big ripple effect, the last penguin update effected more than 10%+ of SERPS.

If your worried about this update then you haven't being doing "SEO" right.

~~~
AznHisoka
There was a lot of collateral damage done to innocent sites during both Panda
and Penguin. I think there's good reason for everybody who relies on Google
traffic to worry a bit.

~~~
nulluk
I understand it's all algorithmic and there will be some truly innocent
collateral damage involved but Google wouldn't be pushing this out if they
didn't feel the overall quality of search would increase.

Most of the collateral damage is going to be people straddling the grey hat
line and rightly so in my own opinion.

~~~
AznHisoka
I don't disagree, but look at it from the perspective of the small business
owner that gets 80% of their revenue from Google traffic. Even if they were
one of the few unlucky ones, their livelihood is lost.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Look at it from the perspective of the small business owner who currently has
next to no revenue from Google traffic, because their genuinely useful or
relevant site is drowned out by spam.

~~~
OGinparadise
That makes sense, if virtually every update didn't promote the likes of
Amazon, eBay, and Google properties. Small businesses are toast and getting
toaster by the update

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wyck
Im glad to see the clustering is being looked into, there is nothing worse
than searching for something and seeing 15 links in a row from the same domain
( like tripadvisor or other large content heavy sites).

~~~
instakill
I agree, with one exception: StackOverflow.

~~~
notatoad
At some point we could probably start searching stackexchange directly rather
than relying on google to return stackexchange links. Their internal search is
really quite good.

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blackdogie
Skip to the 3 minute mark.

The problem with these spam signals, like comment SPAM, it's very hard to know
if they are from the target of the links, or from some other person trying to
damage your reputation online and hoping you get penalised. Google doesn't see
the IPs / email addresses that submit these comments. So it's impossible to
know if they are legitimate or not when it comes to who has created them.

~~~
theseanstewart
This is my biggest problem with Penguin. No website controls who links to
them. Google should do a better job at discounting/ignoring spammy links,
rather than penalize a website with spammy links. It's essentially the same
thing, though one is easier to come back from.

~~~
DanBC
> No website controls who links to them

This is clearly nonsense when some webmasters were buying thousands of links.

~~~
jessaustin
OK, but we can probably say, "many websites have not prevented unsavory
inbound links". How can these sites be helped? Do they need to "referer-bomb"
(e.g. how some photo sites that didn't favor image embedding used to serve
goatse to unrecognized referers) these links to a "don't count this link"
document? Could Google propose a standard semantics for such a document?

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znowi
I hope SEO can be expected to go extinct in the coming whatever and be
replaced with "good content" approach. It is unfortunate that Google even
addresses the shady SEO community boosting their might and glory.

~~~
dchuk
Writing "good content" that you intentionally craft in a way to get optimal
traffic from search engines is inherently search engine optimization, so no,
SEO won't ever go away as long as there are still search engines.

There is this movement lately to call it "content marketing" instead of just
SEO, but really, content marketing is simply an SEO technique.

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swinnipeg
Hacked sites are a dominant strategy is many markets right now. Perp will Hack
N sites, cloak them so only the googlebot sees the hacks, and use those links
to drive rankings of a site in a highly liquid market place (Pharma, gambling,
payday, insurance).

When google can't devalue hacked/cloaked links well, I expect much collateral
damage with Penguin (since it has primarily been focused on low value links).
It won't be a precision attack on webspam.

~~~
nwh
Surely Google could crawl back with a "user" in a new IP range to detect and
ban this sort of behaviour. I was under the impression that they did this to
some degree anyway.

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jgmmo
Wow, supposed to be much more comprehensive then the first penguin update.
This may be a game changer for some.

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arbuge
Not to be too dramatic about this, but I basically feel that the moment it
became possible to negative SEO a competitor for ~$5 via services like fiverr
et al is the moment that will be remembered as the end of Google as a dominant
search engine, or at least the end of a Pagerank-centric algorithm for its
search.

~~~
joonix
What do you propose as an alternative system?

