There are a number of ways to launch a negative seo campaign that doesn't involve bad link building. Scraping content before it's indexed and getting it indexed on your site first, blasting traffic that leaves in seconds to increase bounce rate, etc. You could also start Nuking so many bad backlinks that they can't possibly keep up w/ the Disavow tool unless they want to check back every 10 minutes to see which bad links google found recently lmao. But yeah I still would prefer positive seo to my own sites vs. the alternative.
To get to that kind of quantity you are going to be spending almost an entire marketing budget just praying that the person you are trying to harm cannot fix their mistakes. However a smart marketer knows that you can just download a spreadsheet of your links (Google Webmaster Tools), use OpenSiteExplorer's API in excel (opensiteexplorer.com) to show the value of each link in terms of DA and PA, and then copy and paste the ones they seem as harmful back into Google Webmaster tools. That might take 30 minutes for someone that isn't to familiar with the tools to accomplish, or 5 minutes if you know what you are doing. This is the only method I saw that might work, but again how much in this case would you be willing to spend to see a ROI? By the time you were done with these two tactics alone, you could have developed some epic content and been ranked above your competitor. The best argument I have on top of this is that you might think about this if you were number 2 in the SERPs for a crazy competitive term, but otherwise you are going to be broke trying to get 3,4, or even 5 websites that are above you with Negative SEO.
Generally speaking, only newer sites with little to no existing link profile are at risk to negative SEO. For older more established sites to be at risk we would be talking about an extremely significant volume of links with no guaranteed chances of success. I agree with everything else you've stated in this thread but the reality is that kind of quantity would set you back no more than very low $xxx providing you knew the right supplier - and basically nothing if you had a decent dedicated server yourself... WebDev
Yes I am agree with you. Instead of harming the ranking and reputation of others website you have to work the quality of your website content and backlinks.
I'd like to know what Matt Cutts says about this, and what Google are going to do about it. If poor quality 'unnatural' links, as they call them, harm your site, which they seem to, then surely other people can make these types of links to your site. I wish they'd put things back to like they were before and think of another way of dealing with crap links and content. There's loads of evil requests on odesk for people to bring down other people's sites. like this one from just yesterday, which is appaling. I think Google has created a lot more nasty seo practicies through their latest outlook on website rankings. If you google odesk or elance for 'negative seo' there's loads more. The whole thing is a terrible mess in my opinion.
Well yeah, that's great in theory, but the disavow tool doesn't always work. In fact Google says not to rely on the disavow tool, that you should still try to get rid of 'unnatural links'.... which opens up another can of worms because they won't tell you what they think are unnatural links. Obviously links form a porn site are easy to spot if the site is called pornsite.com or whatever, but they don't all have such obvious names. Furthermore, most people with unnatural link warning against them don't have links from porn sites, he's just using that extreme example in the video and is otherwise typically vague about the underlying issue. Even if the disavow tool did work, it could be months after an evil negative SEO campaign gets notices as unnatural links by Google that the website owner realizes what's happened. So even if they spot it and fix it, the workload is enormous and totally beyond their control. If they're just ordinary folks and not full on web-geeks like most of us here they may not use webmaster tools etc and will never know why no one comes to their site anymore. I just think it's unfair that the onus is on the site owners to fix things to help Google when Google is deliberately vague about what needs fixing, and that they should rethink this whole penalizing for vague reasons ethos and come up with something better that won't let bad people profit from it in such an obvious way as selling their services on odesk, elance and freelancer etc.
The fact of the matter is, Negative SEO pretty much DOESN'T exist - you're claiming it to be a far greater issue than it is. For any site 6+ months old with even a half decent existing link profile, they aren't going to be at risk against these attacks - and those younger than 6 months are extremely unlikely to be targeted anyway. It's such a non-issue, which G is handling perfectly. /THREAD.
http://www.reconsiderationrequests.net/google-hangouts/07-June-2013.php#Q2 From the horses mouth, YES its possible. All depends on how you go about it. The fact that it is possible shows a vulnerability in Google's search engine. Some sites make such high returns from a few days of ranking well that it is worthwhile to them. Google really needs to work on a better response time from its web spam team and this will avoid the need for others to do negative SEO on sites that are cheating the results in the first place.
Time may come when google finds out the ones who did this for other competitors and ban their own site
@NiklasN Do you not think it is important for this to be common knowledge? Or should the many who are actually being hit by neg seo be shoved in a corner? more info = more exploitation more exploitation = more exposure more exposure = large scale problem large scale problem = Google fix on stupid issue less info = unfortunate people being hit suffer in silence and never get help
That's completely wrong. Negative SEO can and WILL work if you know how to do it properly. It's not just about submitting 50,000 bad links to crap directories, there's much more to it and that and if you're intelligent and know what you're doing then you can do it. Sure, it's dangerous, but with training and education on how to do it properly, you can minimize any risk to yourself and harm your competitors a lot.
That is patently absurd. The above poster is correct. That its as lame as my days are long should be enough of an indicator of whether or not one should waste their time giving their competitors link juice. Nigel
You should invest your money in right direction and also fiverr is very bad option. People use the black hat method to do the job. If you will adopt the white hat method and build the natural links then you can compete your competitors.
I currently see businesses doing all kinds of crazy things because they themselves have fallen into a manual penalty. When asked about poor results in search.. Top Employees in Google have said... Sometimes many of the sites on page one are in a penalty much like the payday loans results. As a result they are all competing with each other with a rank suppression. This is because they are all neg seo'ing each other now. Also in loans/insurance and others knocking your competition down for just a few days can return huge results. A well know car site in the UK has been doing this for the last year whilst building multiple one page sites and ranking top 1,2,3 to capture leads. It has taken upto 6 weeks to get those sites removed. The webspam team are simply not quick enough to react.
Sorry Borduhh but this is just not correct. Google Webmaster Tools links has a 2 week delay and so do many others. By this time you have already been hit by x thousand links a day. This has been identified as a huge problem. John Mueller recommended the same thing and suggested if you are being hit that hard then you should contact Google via forums or direct to him. As far as "spending almost an entire marketing budget" are you serious? I know companies that would spend upwards of $50k a month on neg seo like payday loan sites. Its a drop in the ocean compared to the benefits. So going to places like fiverr and buying 1 blast a day is not exactly a big spend. This big issue right now is people getting other websites quality links removed with fake take down requests. The rabbit hole goes very deep. Sites creating fake forum accounts asking to buy links on behalf of their rival company then reporting the posts to Google. Its NOT easy to clean up, its NOT easy to recover and for many medium size businesses its very lucrative and CHEAP to do. So I respectfully disagree with you.