
How to Mitigate a Negative SEO Campaign? - giles_corey
https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/17778048?hl=en
======
Jack000
I've submitted threads like this to the google webmaster forum, and standard
response boils down to:

\- negative seo doesn't work, google can tell the difference between spam
links/sites

\- it's probably an issue with your own site (ie. the deranking is justified)

\- changes in rank are likely due to an algorithm update

I'm not sure if the mods on that forum are even google employees - they seem
to just be random users, not sure how they are selected. I've never seen
anyone on that forum acknowledge that negative seo is effective.

~~~
apankrat
GWF is utterly useless for any non-trivial issues.

They have a mob of high-ranking posters upvoting each others' replies, patting
each other on the back and ultimately ganging up on anyone who doesn't accept
their replies.

We had an issue with a site incorrectly flagged as carrying malware. Submitted
multiple review requests through the Webmasters console, all had no effect and
produced no replies. Completely baffled by the situation, posted to GWF. GWF
top rated reply and their "general consensus" was that we were morons who
don't know our way around basic server administration.

A couple of weeks later we discovered that the Webmasters' console was plainly
broken in the browser that we used to submit review requests. You'd click on
"Submit", it would go "inactive" and the page was reloaded in a bit, but
nothing got sent out. Re-submitted the request with a different browser, it
worked, issue got resolved in a matter of hours, but the GWF interaction left
a _very_ bad aftertaste. F-, won't do it again.

~~~
jacquesm
GWF is utterly useless, the only reason it is there is to provide the
_impression_ of support, not to actually give support. An actual support
channel has a means of escalation, all the way to the top if that is what it
takes to get a problem resolved. With GWF it's luck of the draw at best, and
in most cases just a placebo.

------
bjterry
That response is insane. How on earth could he substantiate it further than
the significant evidence he presented? Would it require an admission of guilt
from the responsible party?

------
jameslk
It sounds like the content is being duplicated, so I think the author can make
copyright claims through the DMCA delisting tool:

[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-
dashboard](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard)

~~~
stevenicr
I spent some months occasionally doing these take down requests to the sites
themselves via contact forms and admins listed in whois. Then waited, and then
sent the requests to the listed hosts, then waited, then did things like the
google de-listing..

A similar process was laid out on the recommendations for doing a 'disavow'
thing with google webmaster tools - the amount of time all this takes is not
trivial.

Then, it happened again two months later, with a whole 'nother set of bad
links from crappy sites.

Since then, it pretty much happens about every month. a hundred or so new
sites with crappy, likely expired or expiring domain names, where many appear
to have names that would of once been used in the past for link ring seo - and
likely were found to stop helping their clients sites and instead starting
hurting - so now links are put towards ours.

So it's about a 50 - 100 new ones every month. I've submitted so many take
down requests and disavow lists - and the dumb specific utf formatting that
they require - ugh. It's a mjow time suck - and with no way to tell what is
helping or hurting.

I suppose if your site was attacked once and left alone it would be worth the
effort, but if someone is serious about taking you down, the effort is better
spent not trying to please google and instead focusing on better places to get
found like snap, insta, fbook ads, etc.

admit - my experience small data point, ymmv for sure.

~~~
stevenicr
For the past couple years, I've added a note in all the disavow uploads
suggesting something like:

# please let webmasters only get links counting when they approve them! # This
would stop bad seo AND negative seo right? # webmaster console can have option
to choose only to count links that # are approved in the console – if it was
piad for bad seo and they approved the # links then that would be proof. If it
was negative seo attack they would not be # approved and not count against.

Not only would this stop negative seo attacks, it would also make it explicit
if a website was trying to use shady seo - only manually approved links would
count - so if someone checked off 300 comment links and 100 wikis or whatever,
there would be no doubt the intent..

It would make shady seo and negative seo harder, and make it easier for those
getting attacked.

Today it also hit me that if this went through, it could prevent google
bombing miserable failure and such perhaps as well - and I can see reasons
that could be considered good, and reasons others might not want to make that
option-able.

I read a while back that googlers most likely won't be reading any of the
disavows or info contained within, but I get the same feels from posting in
the webmaster forums - that purposefully making it so no one knows if google
has seen the posts.

I'm sure there are good reasons for that, like secrets of the algo, and legal
reasons for avoiding things... but it's really hurtful to so many.

One of the last times I get into a thread, after research from some 'top
posters' or whatever they are called - they just said something like 'with
some key phrases there is and has been so much spam and so many different spam
techniques that they just freeze the results and put a few in the top and the
rest far down. So there is no hope of getting those changed.

We have more legitimate questions about certain things, and debated in house
whether using a bunch of google's things (analytics, fonts, tag mgr, all the
things)- we might do better - that seemed not fair at the time, and then what
a few weeks ago someone posts on HN abour seo and one of the main things is
'use all of google's scripts' advice..

I becomes a conflict of interest I think, and a conflict for our users and
their privacy with sensitive subjects - yet others are willing do that all day
for the G traffic - and they get top results.

It's been a funny (and not so funny) thing at the home office seeing a top sex
result running google ads. There are so many conflicts when trying to do
certain things with google - and trying to do what's right is not what is
shown to the world as working, it's frustrating.

I suppose a big goal for the g spam team has been to try to make figuring
things out for seo people really frustrating - and I have seen the result
watching so many others explain how they did good results for a while then
kicked out.. and not just bad links, but having good content.. so the goal of
frustrating so many has been achieved.

On the flip side, google publicly has said for a long time, make a good site
with content the visitors want to enjoy - don't buy links, and you will do
fine the results. Well this does not seem true today and has not for years
now.

again, small data point, ymmv

------
throwaway744678
I think there are two possibilities here: \- the original website is targeted
by attackers seeking to push it down the Google results list \- the original
website is a side effect victim of spammy/malware infested websites who copy
contents from successful pages to be listed in Google results and attract
visitors.

Does that second option make any sense?

~~~
dazc
Since there isn't an obvious monetary incentive to push the site down, I'm
thinking the second option makes a lot more sense?

It's not uncommon for authoritative content to be plagiarized and one needs to
be ever vigilant and be prepared to take direct action rather than relying
upon the wisdom of google's algorithms (which seem to be almost wholly
ineffective in terms of discriminating against such practices).

~~~
epoch_100
There may be a monetary incentive for a polygraph manufacturer to push the
site down.

~~~
jkoudys
There are also hundreds of law enforcement agencies worldwide who rely on the
myth of the "lie detector" in their interrogations.

~~~
throwaway744678
Not worldwide, no. In the US mainly and perhaps a few others, but that's about
it.

------
arn
I'm not saying he doesn't have a problem, but his site does appear above the
others in search results for that quotation. "The consensus view among
scientists is that polygraph testing has no scientific basis"

It's such a specific quotation that there aren't that many sites that have
that text, so the spam sites are gonna appear.

Now if those sites outrank his site for regular search terms "what is a
polygraph" ... then that's a problem. But he didn't seem to indicate that's
the case.

~~~
tedivm
He does indicate it-

> With the text of my homepage replicated across hundreds of such modified
> pages, it has essentially disappeared from Google for key search terms for
> the site, such as "polygraph."

~~~
arn
ok. then right, it's the vaguer question of whether his site deserves to rank
higher than it does for a particular term.

on brief glance, it doesn't look like he optimizes for "polygraph". He does
rank #1 for antipolygraph.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I do not consider the question of whether actual authoritative content should
outrank hacked pages with duplicate content to be ”vague”.

~~~
arn
but that's not the issue here. There is no example where duplicate content is
outranking his. In the quoted query, he ranks higher. Beyond that he says he
doesn't rank well for "polygraph", but not that it's outranked by the spammy
content.

~~~
tedivm
The timing is also interesting, as Google has recently updated their search
engine results to be more "context aware", which may result in sites like that
dropping in the rankings since their subject matter is actually a bit
different than what people searching for "polygraph" might expect.

------
Yuval_Halevi
Around 1 year ago one of my sites got 'attacked' by a negative SEO campaign.

It's annoying that it can happen. If someone wants to hurt your brand they can
do it in more ways.

Spam Reddit till a domain get blocked, buy cheap backlinks on Fiverr etc

I'm not sure how well google is responding to negative SEO.

------
ramenmeal
> If a visitor's user agent doesn't match a selected search engine, the
> browser is redirected either to the hacked website's normal homepage, or to
> an evidently fake, recently created, online marketing website

Could someone explain this bit to me? Don't follow it.

~~~
CodeWriter23
It’s called cloaking. Spider gets one page, visitor gets a different one.

~~~
walshemj
And search engines do check for this they don't only crawl as Googlebot.

------
techaddict009
One guy contacted me he was running Microsoft windows pirated key blog.
Exactly the same thing. Since he was doing piracy he wasn't having guts to
report to google.

Everything was the same as you stated. Just difference was users coming from
google were redirect to some site selling Microsoft keys.

I tried to research it more but since it was related piracy I didn't want to
get involved much. But still couldn't find any solution for it.

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
Why is Google still taking 301 redirects at face value?!

They were doing that 15 years ago and it was causing headaches back then...

Faked pagerank 9 domains used to pull a pretty penny on ebay...

------
teddyh
Cui bono?

That is, who could possibly benefit from hiding anti-polygraph sites? Why,
only all the entities in the world who uses the polygraph to intimidate
people; i.e. all the world’s collected military and intelligence agencies,
plus any really large corporations either with ties to them or who uses the
polygraph themselves.

I don’t think he can expect any help from Google.

------
Exuma
Google:

Seen 3:24pm

------
chupa-chups
Google appears to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors (those which allowed
google to surpass Altavista for example)

~~~
Quarrel
I have various issues with google and the way they approach these issues, but
they're not in the same galaxy as Altavista.

Google surpassed Altavista because it fundamentally bought a better way of
indexing with it, and survived to dominate because it paired that with an
incredibly insightful path to revenue.

Are memories really that short? (Am I really that old?)

We can argue around the edges, but I think any modern search engine user would
be amazed at how bad bad bad search engines were for the basics of answering
your search query, before google.

~~~
jacquesm
Google made a big hoopla about other search engines including paid results in
their listings. Google would _never_ do such a thing. Until they did.

~~~
amscanne
Google clearly marks ads as ads. I believe the criticism was that search
engines of the past would allow paid results to appear organic.

Has Google started doing this and I’m unaware?

~~~
jacquesm
Google was never going to add any ads in their SER section _at all_.

So that went away. Then they kept on fiddling with how the ads are marked to
make it harder to spot the ads, including using colors already in use for
other UI elements in organic results. Then they started advertising their own
properties in advantageous positions (at the top) whether or not the results
were all that relevant, and did not mark these as ads.

~~~
amscanne
> Then they started advertising their own properties in advantageous positions
> (at the top) whether or not the results were all that relevant, and did not
> mark these as ads.

Where and when did this happen?

I recall the early days of Google, and they always had the ads appear first. I
agree that it used to be very clearly delineated from the rest of the results,
and that this has become more subtle over time, but as I far as I know they
have never been disguised or hidden, which is what you’re asserting here. Can
you provide a specific example or screenshot?

------
pkalinowski
OK, so what Google should do about it?

From the outside view, you took your own website (and domain you own) and
began low quality black hat SEO.

It's like expecting Microsoft to step in when somebody got into your Windows
computer by putting in correct password.

~~~
Thorrez
>From the outside view, you took your own website (and domain you own) and
began low quality black hat SEO.

Huh? The black hat SEO wasn't happening on his site, but on a ton of hacked
sites unrelated to him.

