From Graywolf's "How to Be a Dirty Digger" to Greenberg's "The
Saboteurs of Search" we learn that online marketing and politics play
on similar grounds. That the search engines can be manipulated is no
secret, but most SEO's try a positive approach and define their
strategies as ethical or "white-hat."
In Aaron Wall's dictionary, there is no such thing as ethical SEO
because, no matter how you look at it, once you employ a technique
(any) to manipulate the search engines, you "SPAM." The only question
is what kind of spam is acceptable from a Google perspective?
Part of the answer comes from Google's Webmaster Guidelines (quality
guidelines - specific guidelines), more comes from Bruce Clay's SEO
code of ethics, and if that's not enough you could always rely on an
answer from authority SEO professionals.
Now back to SEO as a dirty business.
Strangely enough in real life it is a lot easier to harm than to heal.
Somehow supremacy and power are achieved faster through war than
peaceful negotiations. No surprise here: negotiating peacefully takes
time to find compromises which, in many situations, are not what the
parties involved hoped to achieve.
SEM is quite similar. For every winner, there's a loser, and many
companies that rely on Google for traffic employ questionable SEO
tactics to achieve good rankings for their most competitive keyword
phrases.
But this is nothing compared to those that employ "political tricks" to
harm their competitors. Forbes lists in "The Saboteurs of Search" two
techniques (out of seven): Google bowling and Google insulation.
Google bowling is pure evil and it deals with how to frame a
competitor's site as a spamming site to convince Google to drop its
rankings. This type of negative SEO deals with links -- and many links
at once. These links are generated automatically, over a short period
of time, using special software. They'll mostly come from bad neighbors
and they'll all have the same anchor text, to make the spam picture
complete. Google is just a machine, so there's no real way for this
machine to know who is behind the link spam. The "guilty" site might
lose its position in the SERP or even get banned. Some sites never
recover after a Google ban, others see their rankings vanishing and
their pages landing into the supplemental results and they never learn
why.
If something like this has happened to your site, all you can really do
is to find out who hates you this much. Google bowling is not the only
negative SEO technique that might hurt a competitor site.
Tattling, as correctly identified by Forbes, is something that even
Google's Matt Cutts encourages, by asking people to report sites that
buy links. I really wonder how Google verifies such complaints.
Basically anyone can assume that a contextual link in one of my blog
entries is a paid link (what if I monetize my site with V7 contextual?).
There are many other questionable SEO strategies to demolish
competition. I happen to consider them a waste of time and energy. The
Forbes article quoted above contains a pretty interesting statement:
"Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling
links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't
impossible, but it's extremely difficult."
If negative SEO is difficult, we are prone to believe that it seldom
happens. I think that, in some niches, it happens quite often. But
these are simple theories. As long as I do not have the data to back
them up, I prefer to keep my analysis to a minimum of delivering
information.
There are simpler ways to harm competition. Scrapper sites harm writers
by copying their content. And it is not that difficult to understand
where that "harm" lies.
For example, when a scrapper copies the content of your site, your
rankings are harmed, especially if the scrapper site happens to have
more authority than yours. There is not much you can do to protect your
rankings and your copyright. But if you decide to report the guilty
site to the search engine (file a compliant) the search engine will
remove the site from its index for 10 days, to give you (the copyright
holder) the time to sue for infringement.
Many bloggers wake up one day to find their articles duplicated on
obscure sites, MFA (made for adsense) sites and so on. They are often
frustrated and they ask in forums the classic: what can I do if someone
copies my content. Well, now you have a possible answer: you don't need
to go to court to punish a site for copyright infringement. It is
enough to file a complaint at Google and you've got the guilty site out
of the Google SERPs for at least 10 days.
Careful though, a fraudulent copyright complaint can get you in
trouble, and not just with the search engines. So don't just go around
filing complaints. The Google ban theoretically lasts for just 10 days,
but the trust rank of the accused site will lower. Another similar
complaint and the site's integrity will be seriously questioned. Just
remember: what goes around, comes around.
Saboteurs of Search" we learn that online marketing and politics play
on similar grounds. That the search engines can be manipulated is no
secret, but most SEO's try a positive approach and define their
strategies as ethical or "white-hat."
In Aaron Wall's dictionary, there is no such thing as ethical SEO
because, no matter how you look at it, once you employ a technique
(any) to manipulate the search engines, you "SPAM." The only question
is what kind of spam is acceptable from a Google perspective?
Part of the answer comes from Google's Webmaster Guidelines (quality
guidelines - specific guidelines), more comes from Bruce Clay's SEO
code of ethics, and if that's not enough you could always rely on an
answer from authority SEO professionals.
Now back to SEO as a dirty business.
Strangely enough in real life it is a lot easier to harm than to heal.
Somehow supremacy and power are achieved faster through war than
peaceful negotiations. No surprise here: negotiating peacefully takes
time to find compromises which, in many situations, are not what the
parties involved hoped to achieve.
SEM is quite similar. For every winner, there's a loser, and many
companies that rely on Google for traffic employ questionable SEO
tactics to achieve good rankings for their most competitive keyword
phrases.
But this is nothing compared to those that employ "political tricks" to
harm their competitors. Forbes lists in "The Saboteurs of Search" two
techniques (out of seven): Google bowling and Google insulation.
Google bowling is pure evil and it deals with how to frame a
competitor's site as a spamming site to convince Google to drop its
rankings. This type of negative SEO deals with links -- and many links
at once. These links are generated automatically, over a short period
of time, using special software. They'll mostly come from bad neighbors
and they'll all have the same anchor text, to make the spam picture
complete. Google is just a machine, so there's no real way for this
machine to know who is behind the link spam. The "guilty" site might
lose its position in the SERP or even get banned. Some sites never
recover after a Google ban, others see their rankings vanishing and
their pages landing into the supplemental results and they never learn
why.
If something like this has happened to your site, all you can really do
is to find out who hates you this much. Google bowling is not the only
negative SEO technique that might hurt a competitor site.
Tattling, as correctly identified by Forbes, is something that even
Google's Matt Cutts encourages, by asking people to report sites that
buy links. I really wonder how Google verifies such complaints.
Basically anyone can assume that a contextual link in one of my blog
entries is a paid link (what if I monetize my site with V7 contextual?).
There are many other questionable SEO strategies to demolish
competition. I happen to consider them a waste of time and energy. The
Forbes article quoted above contains a pretty interesting statement:
"Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling
links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't
impossible, but it's extremely difficult."
If negative SEO is difficult, we are prone to believe that it seldom
happens. I think that, in some niches, it happens quite often. But
these are simple theories. As long as I do not have the data to back
them up, I prefer to keep my analysis to a minimum of delivering
information.
There are simpler ways to harm competition. Scrapper sites harm writers
by copying their content. And it is not that difficult to understand
where that "harm" lies.
For example, when a scrapper copies the content of your site, your
rankings are harmed, especially if the scrapper site happens to have
more authority than yours. There is not much you can do to protect your
rankings and your copyright. But if you decide to report the guilty
site to the search engine (file a compliant) the search engine will
remove the site from its index for 10 days, to give you (the copyright
holder) the time to sue for infringement.
Many bloggers wake up one day to find their articles duplicated on
obscure sites, MFA (made for adsense) sites and so on. They are often
frustrated and they ask in forums the classic: what can I do if someone
copies my content. Well, now you have a possible answer: you don't need
to go to court to punish a site for copyright infringement. It is
enough to file a complaint at Google and you've got the guilty site out
of the Google SERPs for at least 10 days.
Careful though, a fraudulent copyright complaint can get you in
trouble, and not just with the search engines. So don't just go around
filing complaints. The Google ban theoretically lasts for just 10 days,
but the trust rank of the accused site will lower. Another similar
complaint and the site's integrity will be seriously questioned. Just
remember: what goes around, comes around.
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1 comments:
Remember that live backwards is ‘evil’ and googles motto of ‘Do no evil’ is an anagram of ‘o no devil’ so its about time you changed to use targ8.com, the all in one search engine and social network search site, who's motto is "Don't Google it, Targ8 it."
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