Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
fathom wrote:
Unproven theories are commonly called myths.
Just because 100s, 1000s or millions believe Elvis is alive... doesn't make it true.
Billions of observations are made every day and all have the same result, yet our understanding of gravitation is still a theory.
--
Ryan
fathom wrote:
Billions every day?
No wonder why your credibility is shot all to ****. Your estimates suck.
Shaddows wrote:
- fathom Link Spams from his domains to customer domains. This burns his domains, but helps his customers. Eventually the links lose power and are discounted, BUT THIS IS NOT A PENALTY.
- No one has first hand experience of a domain being taken down by Paid Links, whereby timelines synchronise.
- Everyone says they "know" someone who either did this, or had it done to them, but this sounds more like the standard Urban Legend formula.
- Google can potentially tie manipultive behaviour to the site owner through myriad tracking techniques. IF penalisation happens, it is due to detection via tracking, not in response to existance of links per se
Anyway, I am actually surprised that no one has tried to demonstrate this practically, preffering to argue in the abstract.
I am actually surprised that no one has tried to demonstrate this practically
- Google can potentially tie manipultive behaviour to the site owner through myriad tracking techniques. IF penalisation happens, it is due to detection via tracking, not in response to existance of links per se
This is, at best, a theory. I'm not personally aware of any case in which Google has provided evidence linking the site owner to the questionable links for which the site is being penalized. I would hope that they have it, but if they don't divulge that information to anyone, the best we can do is speculate.
Matt_Cutts wrote:
I just say thanks for this report. We got a lot of useful data from it--in addition to (just recently) taking action on things that violate our quality guidelines.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:03 pm (utc) on Apr 16, 2012]
[edit reason] fixed code [/edit]
Shaddows wrote:
But, if I read him correctly through the polemic, fathom is saying penalties ONLY come through self-incriminating behaviour [...]
[...] and Google has quite a few tools to detect this. And an army of data analysts paid to detect it.
fathom wrote:
The network was mine... lost it all. The customers didn't lose a thing (but the paid links) their ranks and traffic remained [...]
I don't doubt that this is true, but it does seem rather bizarre. They didn't even lose whatever benefit they gained from participating in your network? Sounds like Google dropped the ball on that.
I don't doubt that this is true, but it does seem rather bizarre. They didn't even lose whatever benefit they gained from participating in your network? Sounds like Google dropped the ball on that.
[edited by: AlyssaS at 1:07 am (utc) on Apr 19, 2012]
[...] we have analysed over 50 reputable websites who have received the message and/or a direct penalty causing a reduction in rankings.
Based on this experience we have observed the following:
- If you get this message in your Webmaster Tools account then it is likely that the site will receive a penalty within weeks
- We have seen several instances where the penalty was given exactly 21 days after the link notice
- Strangely we have also had people contact us with a penalty and no link notice. Sometimes the link notice followed after the penalty
- The penalty is usually phrase based – sites lose rankings for all keywords related to the ones used in the anchor text of the links Google has identified as being “unnatural”
- The penalty is too sharp to be purely link devaluation – in most cases the landing pages being hit fall lower than they would rank with no links at all
- For the worst offenders the penalty can be sitewide
When contacting sites make sure that you ask who placed the link so that you can get in touch with the link-builder directly. We had a case 2 weeks ago where we were removing links placed by a UK agency and found that they had outsourced the work to a member of the Digital Point forums. He admitted to placing links across 600 domains and was happy to remove them for a fee – this dramatically sped up the link clean-up process.
We have seen several instances where the penalty was given exactly 21 days after the link notice
Sometimes the link notice followed after the penalty
The domain I tested on, wasn't linked to analytics or GWT. So I am not sure whether it would have gotten a message or not.
It didn't hurt the entire website. It hurt the page that was aggressively built to and the keywords I used to link with.
Negative SEO is very much real.
fathom wrote:
If I eat a hamburger and fart... I could say that the hamburger cause me to fart... but implying that hamburger causes everyone to fart isn't necessarily true... it isn't logical to blame the hamburger unless you eliminate all other potential causes.
OK - we've now got our first confirmed case study on negative SEO - an attack on Dan Thies's site, which he has confirmed in Google webmaster forums.
Here's the case study (Moderators, I'm linking to another forum, which I know is against the rules, but can you please make an exception for the thread I'm linking 'cause it's kind of important):
Fathom, I think it's about time you did a couple of your own tests. Rather than calling BS on everybody else's that backs up the theory.
Its a sad fact negative seo does exist and they can really damage a site. I remember talking to a guy from McCafree who was telling me how a competitor paid a 15 year old kid to do negative seo and he managed to close the company.
links from blog comments, forum profiles and bookmarking sites
