Negative SEO

First lets define what Negative SEO is.  Negative SEO is using “worst practice” SEO techniques on your competitors to create negative signals to Google.  Depending on how strong these signals are you can potential cause an unsuspecting website to drop in rankings therefore freeing up new slots on the first page of Google for your website.   In full disclosure I have just recently become aware of this niche industry that is sprouting up.  DAGMAR Marketing has never employed these tactics against any competitors or for our clients.  However, due to the changes Google has rolled out and the proliferation of this micro industry I think its time for a crash course so we all can be aware.

Does Negative SEO Work?

There is an interesting thread that I have been watching on Traffic Planet Forum.  A few of the members have targeted a couple websites to prove that Negative SEO works.   Here are their claims:

Rankings Before (22nd March):

seofaststart.com
dan thies – number 1
seo – number 11
seo service – number 34
seo book – number 3

negativeseo.me
negative seo – number 2
destroy your competitiors – number 1

 

Ranking After (18th April) note rankings are still jumping a little:

seofaststart.com
dan thies – number 1 (still number 1)
seo – not in top 1000 (down from number 11)
seo service – not in top 1000 (down from number 34)
seo book – number 34 (down from number 3)

negativeseo.me
negative seo – number 6 (down from number 2)
destroy your competitiors – number 13 (down from number 1)

This doesn’t necessarily prove that Negative SEO works as it doesn’t take into account other events that could be taking place at the same time.  For instance  Dan Thies states that he was changing out his theme at the time and had category issues.  It is interesting to note though that there were significant downward fluctuations during the negative SEO campaign.  If I was a betting man, which I am, I would bet on black here and say that there is a significant more chance that Negative SEO works than not.

Common Techniques of the Negative SEO artist

In the example above the Negative SEO campaign consisted of doing a scrapebox blast that will create several thousand spammy links back to the two sites.  In the past spammy links didn’t hurt as much if you had good links as well in your linking profile.  However, as far back as 2010 Google’s own Matt Cuttsand his “anti-spam” team have been targeting link spam which has been growing over the years.  Now with the addition of the Panda update which targets Blog Networks and content spam it is increasingly easy to create and point these strong negative signals at a competitor.  Here is a list from the Traffic Planet forum of more Negative SEO Techniqus.  Credit is due to member joshbachynski who neither advises or endorses this list which I have shortened and edited.  You can read the full list here.

• If you notice one of your competitors already has spammy links or paid links pointing to their site then you can fill out Google’s spam report and hope that Google will take action in delisting or lowering their rank.
• Create and point thousands of links with the same anchor text for the exact match query to trip Google’s over-optimized penalty.
• Build thousands of spammy links in one day to a competitor which will appear unnatural to Google and trigger the over-optimized penalty
• Subscribe to your competitors RSS feed for new content.  Scrape the new content and duplicate. Then get the duplicated content indexed faster by pinging and using social media…etc.  The competitors site will take the duplicate content hit.
• Buy de-indexed domains and point them at your competitors
• Buy 5000 +1′s in a day towards the competitors site in hopes to trip the spam filter.

Local SEO tactics

• drip feed 100′s of 1 star reviews with negative comments from different gmail accounts on various review sites – this might not lower their ranking but it will effect the Click Through Rate.
• take ownership of your competitors business profile on citation sources and change the phone number and address.

In essence Google knows what a good authoritative site looks like from a link profile and content standpoint.  Google also knows what  a low quality “spam” site looks like.  The more you make your competitor look like the later the better chance you have of taking over their spot or keep them from taking yours.

Again, I don’t use or condone any of these practices.  I point them out to create awareness for the problem that exists.  Living in an online environment where a malicious competitor can affect your rankings and therefore your income is unacceptable.  Why would Google create or allow this environment to exist?  Google makes their money with paid advertisements which is tied directly to the quality of search.  There are incentives for Google to create a better user experience at all cost (reduce spam even at the cost of innocent businesses) than to allow spam to proliferate.  If the end result is a better user experience which promotes more revenue then the unfairness for the few will be overlooked.  There are casualties in war and make no mistake Google is waging war on Spam and enforcing penalties which will have side effects such as this.

What you can do to protect yourself

The best advice anyone can give at this point is to be aware of your links and their structure.  The best cure is prevention.  The more natural and authoritative links you have the harder it will be for spammy links to influence your rankings.  Look at your existing links and anchor text.  If you already have some unsavory links and a disproportional anchor text profile then you may be easy pick’ns for a Negative SEO campaign. (credit @joshbachynski)

Make sure every page you create is pinged, tweated and announced on your Google + account.  This is good SEO practice anyway.  Actively work on your social signals as these are the new links in my opinion and will serve you well going forward in the new age of search.

For small businesses you will want to have an active Review Acquisition Strategy.  Constantly adding positive reviews of your business online will quickly combat any negative reviews that prop up.

Take ownership of your listing in all the major citation sources (about 30)  so you control your listing.  Leaving your listing out there for someone else to claim is a risk that isn’t worth taking.

Hope that Google gets their conscience a little more in order and addresses this problem before it gets out of hand.

If you suspect you have been a target of a Negative SEO campaign I would love to hear about.

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In a recent release from Google ‘s adwords blog it appears what we have suspected for a while will soon become a reality.  Google is going to start showing their own version of Facebook ads on Google Plus.  It has not launched yet but Google is saying it will be a part of their Adwords interface.  I suspect this will be much like their Display Network option where you can opt to have your ads show over a different network than just text based search ads.

It will be interesting what type of conversions we will see.  I suspect it will do well for a select demographic as the people that are on and actively use Google Plus tend to be more technical and social oriented.  Most people lacking those two attributes tend to stay within one social platform.  Right now that platform is Facebook.  Most of the people I have in my circles are only people that embrace technology and have multiple social channels that they actively develop.

I also suspect that Google will give us much better demographic controls as there will be much more information about the user that will come into play.  Currently adwords ads are triggered by keywords that a user inputs into Google.  With Google Plus advertising we will be able to target conversations that are happening in real time about your product or niche.   We will also be able to target users that live in your geographical area which is great for Local SEO.  All of this is speculation of course but all of these things you can do now with Facebook advertising so I suspect a similar product with perhaps a few Google twists thrown in.

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Straight From the Horses Mouth.

I have read some difference of opinions online in regards to domain age and domain registration length effecting search rankings. Many SEO’s feel that both domain age and length of registration effect search engine rankings.  I am one of them.  This debate has been going on for years as Google, in a round about way, says it doesn’t effect rankings.

This matter has come up recently with some of my clients so I wanted to put to rest this debate.  Surely there can never be a true victor but with the information below I think you will agree that domain age and registration length matter.  Although I do believe it is a minor signal in the grand scheme of things.  Here it is straight from the horses mouth.

Domain Registration Length of Time.

Matt McGee has a nice blog post back in 2009 talking about domain registration length.  The below video is of Matt Cutts stating domain registration time frame doesn’t matter…kinda.

One thing I have noticed with Matt Cutts is whenever he is asked about a potential ranking factor and his response is ” I wouldn’t worry about that” then you can almost bet that you have nailed a ranking factor.

Danny Sullivan asked if the length of time a domain is registered for matters in search rankings to Matt Cutts directly and this is his response:

To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring. If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling.

Sounds like a political statement to me.  Often times we have to read between the lines to decipher what is being said.  I find that you  can tell as much if not more by what is not being said then by what is.  All Matt Cutts is saying is that they have never confirmed this to the best of his knowledge.  Here is a excerpt from their patent involving the use of historical data in regards to this claim.

[0097] According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, information relating to a domain associated with a document may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with the document. For example, search engine 125 may monitor information relating to how a document is hosted within a computer network (e.g., the Internet, an intranet or other network or database of documents) and use this information to score the document.

[0098] Individuals who attempt to deceive (spam) search engines often use throwaway or “doorway” domains and attempt to obtain as much traffic as possible before being caught. Information regarding the legitimacy of the domains may be used by search engine 125 when scoring the documents associated with these domains.

[0099] Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

This clearly states that Google COULD use domain data if they wanted to.  I recommend all my clients to have at least a multi-year registration on their domain.  I don’t think you need to register for 10 years but if you can it wouldn’t hurt.

One thing that is apparent about Google is they will use all data points about  your website (or as they say in their patent – “document”) to build a profile for your site.  They will use Chrome browser data, Google Toolbar data, Analytics data, Adsense data, Adwords data and any other data points they can find about how people interact with your website.   How do I know this?  I will answer a question with a question:  Why wouldn’t they?   You will find that Google will use your Favorites data and bookmarking data to add to a websites profile.  Don’t believe me?  Read below.

[0114] According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, user maintained or generated data may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with a document. For example, search engine 125 may monitor data maintained or generated by a user, such as “bookmarks,” “favorites,” or other types of data that may provide some indication of documents favored by, or of interest to, the user. Search engine 125 may obtain this data either directly (e.g., via a browser assistant) or indirectly (e.g., via a browser). Search engine 125 may then analyze over time a number of bookmarks/favorites to which a document is associated to determine the importance of the document.

[0115] Search engine 125 may also analyze upward and downward trends to add or remove the document (or more specifically, a path to the document) from the bookmarks/favorites lists, the rate at which the document is added to or removed from the bookmarks/favorites lists, and/or whether the document is added to, deleted from, or accessed through the bookmarks/favorites lists. If a number of users are adding a particular document to their bookmarks/favorites lists or often accessing the document through such lists over time, this may be considered an indication that the document is relatively important. On the other hand, if a number of users are decreasingly accessing a document indicated in their bookmarks/favorites list or are increasingly deleting/replacing the path to such document from their lists, this may be taken as an indication that the document is outdated, unpopular, etc. Search engine 125 may then score the documents accordingly.

[0116] In an alternative implementation, other types of user data that may indicate an increase or decrease in user interest in a particular document over time may be used by search engine 125 to score the document. For example, the “temp” or cache files associated with users could be monitored by search engine 125 to identify whether there is an increase or decrease in a document being added over time. Similarly, cookies associated with a particular document might be monitored by search engine 125 to determine whether there is an upward or downward trend in interest in the document.

Domain Age

Something else that is worth mentioning that if you have a new domain and are building relevant links early and often you can outrank an older domain with more links that hasn’t added any links or content recently.  Google sees your site as being fresher which relates to being more relevant.  More info on that below:

[0039] Consider the example of a document with an inception date of yesterday that is referenced by 10 back links. This document may be scored higher by search engine 125 than a document with an inception date of 10 years ago that is referenced by 100 back links because the rate of link growth for the former is relatively higher than the latter. While a spiky rate of growth in the number of back links may be a factor used by search engine 125 to score documents, it may also signal an attempt to spam search engine 125. Accordingly, in this situation, search engine 125 may actually lower the score of a document(s) to reduce the effect of spamming. 

However, if you have a seasoned domain age and ad frequent relevant content along with frequent but natural backlinks then it will be very hard for a newer domain to overtake your rankings.

This also comes into play with certain link building services that promise 3,000 links in 1 week!  Simply put….don’t do it.  For most small businesses this would make your Google index profile look unnatural.  Variation and moderation are key here.

Of course for those of you that embrace good consistent SEO practices none of this is new information and in the immortal words of Matt Cutts:  ”I wouldn’t worry to much about that”.

Resources used:

SEO by the sea blog

Google’s historical patent online  (scroll to page 4)

Good forum discussions related to this

SEOMoz put together a nice summary of this patent.

Photo provided under CCL by Juvetson

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As part of my daily reading I came across this unique video that takes the viewer behind the scenes into a Google Quality Search meeting.   One thing I liked was how informal this meeting was.  You can see  Amit Singhal who is Senior VP at Google mixed with what looks like recent college grads in a conference room that for most multi billion dollar companies would be a storage closet.  Google is known for having a very laid back corporate structure and in this video we see all levels of expertise interacting with one another regardless of position.

You can see why Amit is the VP as he addresses a seemingly inconsequential change to the algorithm, one that only effect .1% of search and would have drastic resource requirements to implement.  The consensus seems to accept the simple workaround when  Amit says “why don’t we juts do it right”.  You can almost feel the momentum shift in the video as the lack of arguments to that logic are pealed back.   Paul Haahr a ranking lead with Google is the only one that fires back but again there is no argument to “just do it right”.

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Rich Snippets

Google has been experimenting with rich snippets for quite a while now.  Rich Snippets are extra media showing up in the SERP’s such as gold star reviews and author pics.   There are several other categories of Rich Snippets but these were the two I targeted as they are most relevant for my clients.  Google is experimenting with sites that have these microformats marked up correctly.  If done properly Google will reward you with either a star rating for hReview or an author image for rel=”author”.    Linda Buquet mentioned an added bonus in her Google Places Blog for Local Search so I finally put the time to implement this on dagmarmarketing.com so I would know how to do it for my  clients.  Mike Blumenthal made another good post about google aggregating your reviews if marked up with hReview and showing them as part of your Google Places.

I wasn’t intending on writing a blog myself as there are several good blogs about this, however I felt it would be valuable to condense it down to just the information about implementing hReviews on your site.

hReview

This microformat allows  for the markup of reviews on your site in a format that is easily aggregated by search engines.  Here is an example:

hReview Creator

You can create your own hReview using the hReview creator.  One thing I will mention here is that you will want to be careful with the TYPE field.  I set mine to “business” and Google gave a notice that hReviews would not be displayed in SERP’s for type = businesses and then went on to give the other types that would be displayed such as restaurants.

I could not recreate this message for this post so it looks like Google has changed this.  Regardless if you see a message like that you will want to leave the type field blank which will populate this attribute as “fn” for family name.  I highlighted the attribute above to show the location in the code to look for.  You can put this either in a widget or make a testimonial page like mine.  I simply wrapped each review in the hReview format.  One other thing worth mentioning about the hReview Creator is that you will want to manually edit the date field as it stops at 2008.

I also deleted the last lines of code that displayed links back to the hReview creator.  Normally I like to give credit but for the sake of my testimonials page I’ll have to give credit here in my blog.

Google Rich Snippet Tester

Once you have this setup and working on your blog you can test it using Googles Rich Snippet Tester.   A successful test will look something like the image below.

Pro Tip:

Once you have a successful test of your hreview markup done you will want to let Google know that you have implemented a Rich Snippet on your website.   If you take the time to answer all the questions Google will reward you with gold stars on your listing within 2-3 days.

Thats all there is to it.  Of course things change so when that happens I will edit this page to keep it up to date.

Resources:  I found most of my information on a well made article from SEO Gadget.  I felt the need to condense the resources sited on this blog into just what is needed to implement this on your site.  I hope this was helpful.

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No more Red Pins

It is being widely talked about on SEO blogs about the test layout that Google is spreading around.  Perhaps you have seen a version of this floating around your local searches.  There are a lot of ideas as to what Google has up it’s sleave such as paying for the Red Pin to appear.  I’m not sure I subscribe to that theory since Google for a while has been showing a blue pin for Adwords Express adds that appear on the map.  It would make more sense to grey out the red pins so that the blue pins stand out more, which actually isn’t a bad hypothesis.

Reviews, Reviews, Reviews

However, if I were a betting man, which I am, then I would put my money on Google wanting to highlight the yellow stars for reviews.  Take a look at the picture above and what immediately stands out to you.  Look at it a few times.  I for one didn’t even notice the lack of red pins until about the 3rd glance.  In fact this was the first time I have seen this layout live in the Jacksonville area.  Up until this point I have only read about it on various blogs.

If you take the various Google design changes such as the changes to Google Places and Gmail recently you will notice it’s a “less is more” mentality.  Various areas are muted which make the areas that Google wants to be more prominent stick out such as Compose, and Search in the new Gmail layout.  The new Google Places layout features the Review button above all else.

I believe the changing of the red pins to grey to be in keeping with these design changes.  It is my opinion that Google wants to draw your eye to the reviews so that you will read the reviews thereby increasing the chances that users will leave a review.  Think about it.  How many of us read reviews before we make our decision?  I know I do.  Given the fact that Google has added +1 to websites and even adsense along with the recent Google Places changes it’s a fairly easy conclusion to draw that Google wants to incorporate more social signals into their Search Algorithm.  This to me is the single best explanation of what is going on with all the layout changes.  Want to know where Google is going?  Take a look at what stands out on their pages and the road map becomes clear.  Can I get a +1 anyone?

Where did the Red go?

If you find yourself missing all the Red from the pins, then you won’t have to look too far to find it . All my money is on Red!

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Star Rating not showing up in Google Places

A client of mine recently asked why his Places page wasn’t showing his star rating.  Most of his competitors were showing a star rating while his rating wasn’t showing at all.  He had 4 reviews which Google did show but the stars were not showing.  Maybe this has happened to you?

My response to my client was an educated guess.  I saw several businesses that had 6 or more with their star rating showing.  Knowing Google likes to manage things with data I surmised that Google wouldn’t show an average star review without enough data to make a valid average.  Anyone can have a friend or family leave one or two reviews so it made sense for Google to require enough reviews before they show the average star rating for a business.

It’s all about the reviews.

I have been working with my client to increase his reviews on Google Places.  Yesterday he acquired his 5th 5 star review and like a champ the star rating showed up.  Consequently his #3 place ranking moved up to #2 for this particular keyword.  I couldn’t find many posts out there regarding this magic number of reviews that it takes to get your star rating working so I thought I would post my findings.  I welcome your comments.

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Google just announced that they have been testing for some time a change to the adwords QualityScore algorithm.  It seems that if your landing page is more relevant to your adword’s campaign keywords then it will be cheaper and easier to rank higher for your Pay Per Click campaign.  The quality of Landing Pages has always been a part of the Quality Score.  Here is a quote directly from Google about what makes up the Quality Score.  It looks like they are going to put more weight on this line item.

[While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the Search Network, the core components remain more or less the same:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain; note that CTR on non-Google sites (such as AOL.com) only ever impacts Quality Score on our search partners – not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors]

That is a nice help for local small businesses that compete with national advertisers for ad space for local keywords.  Now more than ever it is important to maximize your adwords campaign by optimizing your website for the keywords in your campaigns.

It will be nice to see a significant decrease in cost-per-click in some of my campaigns.  If it’s significant I will make another post about the savings.

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In a recent post from Google’s Webmaster blog it now appears that we should start seeing webmaster tools information within Google Analytics.    This is a nice feature as I constantly trolled between the two for information panels.  Analytics will now feature 3 reports based on webmaster information:

• Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
• Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
• Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country

However, to start seeing this set of merged data you will need to link your webmaster account with your analytics account.  Here is the link to Googles help article on how to do this but all you need to know is below:

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click Manage site next to the site you want, and then click Google Analytics property.
2. Select the web property you want to associate with the site, and then click Save.

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Small businesses are learning the hard way why it’s so important to manage your online reputation.  The New York Times just ran an article about Google Places pages showing up in search results as “permanently closed”.  If you are not familiar with Google Places you might want to read this.  Google Places is Google’s version of the yellow pages and appears on the map when a user searches for a business locally.

Most businesses need only claim their listing and fill out a few sections describing their business category, hours of operation and a description of their business to be able to show up for local searches.   There is a bit more to Google Places especially the offer section as well as Adwords Express but I’ll talk more about that in another post.

Google does a good job verifying that you are indeed the owner of the business however, when it comes to closing a business that is where things become a little frustrating.

Since most businesses that are closing down can’t be expected to take the time to make this known in Google Places, Google rely’s on customers to notify that a business is closing.  If enough customers say this business is closed then Google inserts the “Permanently Closed” tag on the Google Places Profile.

According to Mike Blumenthal a leader in local search, it only took him 2 times to report that Googles own Mountain View location was closed for business after being frustrated with Googles cavalier attitude toward the fraudulent closings.

This gives unscrupulous competitors or disgruntled employees leverage that can be devastating to a local business.  It would be the equivalent of a few customers calling in to your local Yellow Pages and being able to delete your Yellow Page ad.  Not a perfect analogy but you get the point.

Google claims to have a verification process but given the large amounts of complaints on Google forums this claim fails to hold water. Google does send an email notifying the business owner of the permanently closed status, however in a lot of cases most of those email addresses were created just to edit their Places page and then quickly forgotten about or rarely checked.

Given the amount of attention on this, I expect that Google will come up with a solution soon.  Regardless it is another example of how businesses cannot afford to neglect their online presence any longer.  If we as business owners don’t take responsibility of our online identity then someone else will.

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