If they hack your websites, they are illegal. But negative SEO is legal.

I agree with you Jaya, this is a battle of giants where the most dominant website can use this methods to kill new upcomming sites.

I agree with you Jaya, this is a battle of giants where the most dominant website can use this methods to kill new upcomming sites.

That’s not entirely true. The way you should go about business is by getting links you would go after if google never existed. For instance, the yellow pages in the UK is bought advertising with do follow links.

Absolutely, if Google whack sites for building links, then regular sites will build less links than they once did making them more vunerable.

My sites are squeaky clean in terms of on site work. Good content, custom graphics, custom features, good user interraction.

Alongside all this investment I also built links, which is why my sites died.

Long since abandoned sites have improved their rank substantially.

I have a very good idea which links caused the problem, these are extremely easy to point at another site.

I am sure I could bring down other sites very easily.

I have looked at some penalized sites which were owned by “no hats”, i.e. Mom n pop sites who did no seo and made innocent mistakes on some of their sites. These sites had a mass of very good content and resources, and actually had very few links compared to my own sites.

Google trashed them for these minor (innocent) infringments, it would be so easy to induce this penalty its ridiculous.

Time will tell, there are a number of people busying themselves with negative SEO now, we will soon know one way or the other what kind os sites can be brought down and which cannot.

If those “pioneers” are successful and report their findings publicly things will get even worse.

I am very worried about some of my own fledglings.

Hey Jaya

Yep, I agree, it’s not a good thing, far from it but maybe this noise will end up being a good thing as Google simply can’t let this be the case as it would be far simpler to do this than concentrate on doing the right thing. If this turns out to be true, then, there credibility is really at stake if they don’t sort this out and with all the effort being put into the spam / quality side of things, this is just going to allow the cheats to run rampant.

I am still not entirely convinced though that clean sites can get hurt. Will be really interesting to see how this pans out over time and what experiments get put together and what the real deal is.

I think the big worry going forward is that established sites could just trash any newer sites entering the space. If you identify a site early on in its life you can cause a hell of a lot of damage, potentially killing a new startup.

The possibility exists, that if a spike of bad links gets googles attention, then your site loses some trust that may impact other ‘less than perfect’ links you may have built or had built that may have been propping things up.

In the case of Dan Thies site, it seemingly had little to no recent content, no social signals and some dubious existing links so could the problem be more that the existing links got more scrutiny after the spike in bad links.

Additionally, if someone had it in for your business, there is a lot they can do without negative SEO. Spurious bad reviews, website defacement, false duplicate content, hacking or attempting to take your site offline or to get in and link out to bad neighbourhoods, deliver malware, defamation across forums and blogs (the list goes on). If negative SEO is something that people have to add to their toolbox then so be it but the big picture is that this is nothing new and it has not caused the internet to sink into a burning pit of hate, lies and false reviews (although I am sure there are lots of false good reviews out there so this may balance that out some).

The thing that I really take away from all of this is that the core white hat principles remain unscathed: build content, build a site for your users, aim to get authoratitive links and simply put, just keep fighting the good fight!

I would also add I am not in the business of trashing other peoples sites, I am concerned about this as I have a number of new sites that are going to be vunerable to this.

Thinks like Proxy Hijack or 302 Hijacking a negative review were more effective.

It has always been possible to nuke a decent quality site with bad links, but the effects were always temporary and you could see the site come back stronger a couple of months down the line.

That has now changed, it looks like the effects are permanent now, that is the big change.

Whilst Google view spam either positively or negatively it “makes a difference”.

As long as spam “makes a difference” it has commercial value.

I have a couple of sites related to this stuff, and can tell you more people are hitting those sites over the last couple of days.

Today someone asked me for some a set of “files” which I gave to him, in the current climate I suspected they were for “negatvive” use, he later told me he was going after 5 sites on a particular SERP.

No doubt if he is successful the owners of those sites may retaliate, perhaps figuring out who did it, or just nuking anyone who stood to gain from it.

Its a shame the “estimeed engineer” cannot seem to get his brain in gear on this one.

Spam will only go away when Google IGNORE IT.

Jen,

Can you share your alternative traffic sources with us?

As always, thank you for your help.

yeah, Alex – you’re really cute 🙂

Thanks!
Cindy

PS It is not anyway near ready for public view, but as soon as it is I will be back here to let you know about it!