Heads up, my interweb amigos! Matt Cutts, head of Google’s
webspam team, has just released another Webmaster Help video on YouTube. This time, the topic de jour is negative SEO and ways in which webmasters can fight back against the practice.
You may remember the subject rearing its ugly head a few months back.
What am I talking about?! Many of you likely remember it vividly given
the sheer volume of threatening emails sent to webmasters before the
“disavow links” tool made its belated appearance.
For those of you who dodged that bullet, let me bring you up to
speed. Blackhat SEOs would target a site doing well in the SERPs and
point links from “bad neighborhoods” to it. Then, the blackhat would
contact the webmaster and demand a ransom payment in exchange for
removing the offending links.
Sketchy, right? But wait, it gets worse.
In another case, competing webmasters would do a little “Google
bowling” by knocking out sites ahead of their own in the SERPs. How?
Simple – they’d point dirty links to the site until it dropped into
Google oblivion.
And it worked. Really well.
Regardless of the method of attack, negative SEO had most definitely
become a monster of a problem. Webmasters the Internet over bemoaned the
practice, and those who enjoyed even a small amount of search engine
success lived in fear that a blackhatter would come along, and rip away
all their hard work overnight.
Never fear, says Cutts, Google’s got a tool for that.
Negative SEO: A Thing of the Past?
In his video, Cutts first notes that Google designs every one of its
new algorithms defensively – that is, they have many different
safeguards in place to protect webmasters from bad guys who want to
manipulate the changes to hurt them. G constantly tests, he says, for
holes or security flaws in the algos that spammers could potentially use
to hurt others. Google’s system is not perfect, of course, which is why
each and every algorithm has a wave of changes and updates that follow
its initial rollout.
Google’s maturing as a company, and it’s becoming much better at what
it does, however. Matt gives the example of the great blog network
takedown earlier this year – he says G is becoming more sophisticated at
determining link quality and deciding how to rank sites accordingly.
For those times when Google fails to get it right, however, Cutts
says to look to the “disavow links” tool to save your site. If you
discover that some creep launched a negative SEO attack against your
website, don’t fret. Simply log into your Google Webmaster Tools account
and use the handy little tool to disavow any links that you deem
untrustworthy or don’t recognize. Once you do this, Google will no
longer count those links toward your site’s ranking. Translation: you’re
officially free from the negative SEO attack.
There is one thing that the spammers will be able to steal from you,
however, and that’s your time. If an attack is massive enough, you could
potentially lose days cleaning up the mess in your Webmaster Tools
account. No sweat, says Cutts – for cases such as these, you can request
that Google ignore entire domains. That way, you won’t need to waste
even more time disavowing each link individually after an attack.
A Warning to Negative SEOs
Spammers aren’t the only ones who turn to the dark side of search. A
few gray hat SEOs have been known to dabble in negative SEO from time to
time in order to manipulate the SERPs as well. Before the tool, it was a
case of low-hanging fruit looking a little too easy to pick. Now,
though, Cutts says those considering the dark path need not bother.
For those of you tempted to continue with the practice – don’t. It’s
now a waste of time; time that would be better spent building up your
own website and succeeding in the SERPs aboveboard. Remember that
rankings fluctuate 24/7, and the websites in the top ten for a term
today may not be the same bunch tomorrow. That’s why directing a
negative SEO attack at a website is completely counterproductive –
imagine you do pull it off, only to discover a whole new set of websites
you need to attack a week later, after a new algo rolls out.
Instead, focus on creating great content, adding to your site,
becoming known as an authority in your niche, and networking with your
peers. This is the one and only lasting way to generate truly organic
traffic. Then, once your site is popular, you will begin ranking without
even realizing its happening. Search engine traffic will be nothing but
gravy on top of a full meal of referral traffic. That’s when you’ll
know you’ll never have to worry about negative SEO again.
Nell Terry,
Post from: SiteProNews
Google’s Matt Cutts on Negative SEO: Deciphering the Subtext
