Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics - Another Reason to Hate Bowling
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I turned up a number of negative SEO methods in my research, but none of them seemed to be as universally hated as Google bowling. Sometimes called a “link of death operation,” Google bowling involves linking the victim’s site to tons of bad neighborhoods such as blatant link farms and using spammy anchor text. Rather than let the search engines find these links themselves, an aggressive negative SEO would then submit the link farm pages to the search engines so that they’ll see the thousands of bad links in a hurry.
Another variation of Google bowling simply involves creating thousands of links in a short period of time to the victim’s site across a wide range of social media. To Google and the other search engines, it looks like the victim is engaging in “link spam,” and the automated algorithm may penalize the site accordingly. This is sometimes called “black social bookmarking.”
In theory, this shouldn’t work too well, because Google supposedly understands that a site owner can’t actually control who links to their site. In practice, there is at least anecdotal evidence to indicate that Google bowling does happen, and that it works, at least temporarily. Jason Duke, a London-based practitioner of negative SEO quoted in the Forbes article, noted that one of his own sites was hit by this tactic. It lost an estimated five million unique visitors in less than two weeks.
There are plenty of other negative SEO tactics. In some cases, whether they’re negative or positive really depends on how they’re used, as many of the techniques represent “too much of a good thing.” The Forbes article listed six in addition to Google bowling:
- Tattling: Reporting a site to Google for buying links from other sites.
- Google insulation: Creating more content than competitors and floating it to the top of Google results. This technique is also used by ReputationDefender to hide online criticism of its clients.
- Copyright takedown notices: A negative SEO practitioner may file a copyright complaint with a search engine against a competitor, claiming to be the copyright holder. The search engine then must remove the page from its index for 10 days while the copyright holder decides whether to sue. This approach can backfire, since someone filing a fraudulent takedown notice can become the subject of a lawsuit.
- Duplicate content: Older, more trusted sites can sometimes harm a new competitor by stealing their content. Search engines hate duplicate content. The hope is that the engines will assume that the newer site duplicated their content and penalize them accordingly – while the older site steals the newer site’s higher position.
- Denial of service attack: This basically involves making a competitor’s site unreachable by means of a DoS attack, then attempting to get the search engines to index the site while it can’t be reached – thus bumping them out of the index.
- Click fraud: I’ve covered this in a number of other articles, so I won’t repeat myself here.
Next: Truly Brazen Attacks >>
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