We used a company in the Philippines to promote our waterbed site We were convinced they were purely white hat. They posted spam on hundreds of forums at our expense. I would have thought Google, Yahoo etc would have the ability to recognize and trace the source quickly and save the web from this junk. Maybe they could publish their addresses so we could go round and let their tires down. Any better ideas?
LOL, no, sadly not. Just live with it and move on. Got to be careful who you hire, mate. All these people who claim to be white hat, etc, and are just really spammers. They think that they are white hat because they do it manually. Spam is still spam. And most who claim to do x, y or z manually are lying. It's too time consuming to do hundreds of webdirectory/article submissions manually, especially for such a low reward venture. So it's always pretty obvious bullsh*t. A lot of wannabe "white hatters" on here will give you a list of what they call off-shite SEO/linkbuilding. No, off-sh*te wasn't a typo as that's what it pretty much well is. OK... end of my rant. These spammers will use proxies and automated tools, won't link to any profiles, etc, so they won't be very traceable through the spam activities. Aside from the content, which is sadly directed to your site. Don't worry about it too much. Ride out the current storm (Google Update) and evaluate your rankings then. Whether you've been hurt or not, put together a good white hat plan. I really recommend spending time reading SEOMoz Blog (also the UGC one) and Search Engine Land. You'll find some good white hat strategies on there and not the spam rubbish that's typically recommend on here by the white spam hatters.
Doing it manually or through automated tools it can be called as spam and also considered as gray hat seo tactics. However, until we do have backlinks from the quality and high PR sources there will be no problem for us. But, make sure that the backlinks should looks like natural one's because google doesn't recommend high optimization.
google has the ability to track many things. like they can track your search history and deliver ads based on your search pattern. they surely can monitor certain level of spam but spammers get smarter day by day and they figure out ways to spam without being caught. using proxy or VPN can hide your identity so its not possible for google to know who is actually spamming. but if you spam with your own ISP IP, then you are doomed.
We dropped from the top of page 2 to page 4 today. I'm hoping Google is just having its 'time of the month' and things will settle back down. If not I fear the worst. Now the spineless ***t won't reply to emails after blaming one of his staff. We'll take the advice of ryan_uk to focus on our proper SEO and hope time will smooth things over.
I think Google can track site spammers but i don't know how true it is but in the future you should be careful who you hire to run your site.
A bit paranoid, really. Google isn't the internet, but a search engine. It doesn't know exactly what each individual does on a site. It can however guess what the intent of a link is (when GoogleBot crawls the site and picks up the content) through applying various algorithms, so it can guess with a degree of certainty if it's paid, a blog comment, in-content, etc. (Yes, it has Adsense and Analytics, so it can track ad clicks and where you go on a site but not exactly what you do - anyone could have placed the link.) The ultra-paranoid Google knowing everything theory is proliferated by black hatters who spam and think Google is out to get them personally. Yes, Google is watching you via your webcam, so stop spamming. Google is also watching you do black hat stuff right now.
Good luck, mate. If it's happened today, you should do an on-page SEO evaluation, too, as the Penguin update could have contributed to that fall too.
i think they can trace that people and help you out. but in reality you will need to hire proper person to do these kinda stuff. better be careful from next time otherwise it will continue to repeat.
Yes google CAN track spammers. But they are not fast most of the times. You can always try to cheat them somehow but they will get you at some point and you will lose. If someone does cheat succesfully will never tell so though.