Because of a letter to Google I seen posted by one of the moderators on the forums at seochat.com .. it sparked some thoughts for me.. He points out that the current Penguin update downgrades sites for over optimizing.. for backlinks from spammy neighbourhoods, and for repetative keyword stuffing in links and on webistes pages.. So with that in mind, he also points out that any underground SEO tactics now will become more and more easy to implement by effectively "shooting down" the competitors above you in the serps.. by spamming links to their sites from blog link networks, creating spammy duplicate blogs loaded with keyword links etc and other tactics.. Do you think Google has a plan for honest webmasters in situations like this? Do you think this sort of thing will gain momentum if Google doesn't have a plan for detecting this, or it rises in popularity? Thoughts are welcome.. !!!...
thought of it myself lately, yes i believe too it's the beginning of a new era. we're about to see webmasters "badly promoting" their competitors. If google won't find a quick solutions he will be hardly damaged since the serps won't reflect anything real...
Everything is good and knowing the updates is more good but what i don't understand is how people knows the updates from Google (even though it is not publicly announced either in the official google blogs or support sites), could any one answer to this question?
Its been publically announced and you don't have to look very hard to find dozens upon dozens of articles that link to the Google post.
Yes there was an article not too long ago where an experiment was done to see if it was possible, by using negative seo, to drop the ranking of a competitor site. The people who ran the experiment were successful. So the whole thing is one big mess now as G won't be able to tell who the real spammers are. With the newest update, this will be the prime service offered by SEO companies. I've been waiting to here how G is going to deal with this, but so far I've heard nothing. I'll try and find that article and edit this with a link to it.
The threat of negative SEO is very real, but the likelihood of it becoming a prevalent practice is minimal. It's a big gamble, and most website owners will understand that it is in their best interest to build up their own website, rather that sneakily destroy others.
I would do that but the many competitors I have purchase the keyword rankings from google so they will not be de-ranked anyway.
Negative SEO has always been possible but penguin has made it even easier for unethical SEO to harm their competitors.
I'm sure glad my website is nonprofit, therefore not a target of other webmasters' negative SEO. I accept no ads, and my web income is deliberately zero, so they have no temptation to try to go "negative" on me in an attempt to steal a piece of my site's "action".
Not even any revenue huh. Well, that's noble considering wikipedia is non-profit and the guy makes millions a month from it.
Google has made people paranoid about their backlinks! New (unethical) business: blast crappy links at random websites, charge $$ to remove them...)
Right, we're quite different from sites like wikipedia. At the outset I made the editorial decision to take no ads and to solicit no funds (nor to receive them). I just felt I was supposed to make the website (sig link #2) free to all. To my great surprise and blessing, on a good month it gets about 100,000 unique visitors.
It's has been going on for a long time, but the update has definitely contributed to the overall negative SEO
I'm not sure how its thought that negative SEO won't become more prevalent. Google has so much data and so much analyzing power behind it...but the Internet is a billion headed monster that is constantly evolving. They're going to incentivize sneaky shnit. Not sure how they're going to be able to keep it straight.
negative seo might be very possible given the google current policy. but I am afraid this would cause bad competition: people could not focus on their own websites!