Google recently updated its claims regarding the ability of other webmasters to affect your rankings via negative SEO. While questions about the efficacy of negative SEO continue to exist, it does not seem to be slowing down the growth of what is arguably the most contemptible part of the search industry.
On July 9th, a good friend of mine reached out to me with a problem. As a very risk-averse webmaster, he constantly plunges into the numbers, especially anchor text diversity, in order to make sure his site is as penalty-proof as possible. The latest updated data in SEOmoz's MozScape revealed a massive shift towards anchor text over optimization for several primary terms. It took only a few minutes to identify the culprit.
Diagnosing the Damage
The first step was to dig down into all the link data to identify just how deep the damage was. We downloaded all the links available on SEOmoz, MajesticSEO and AHrefs to make sure that we had every possible outlet covered. It didn't look good. On a primary keyword, the number of unique linking domains with exact anchor text went up 20x in a matter of two days. Below is an example of one of the spam posts.
Now the leg work began of identifying as many negative links as possible. But this is when it got interesting. We were able to quickly identify that there were several sites involved in the attack.
Wait, what? Did you just read what I read? Distilled, the venerable white-hat SEO company was being attacked along side several bingo sites and an insurance liability website. This was too interesting to give up. At that point, I knew my day was shot.
Footprints, Footprints, Footprints
Let me go ahead and get this out - if you are thinking about doing negative SEO and are not a regular practitioner of black hat SEO, you are going to get caught. Sorry, but you just haven't thought it through enough to cover your tracks. What follows is a perfect example of that.
After digging through several of the XRumer spammed backlinks, most hitting up old .cgi guestbooks and bulletin boards, I noticed a handful of sitewide links coming from poor quality blogs. My first instinct was that these were from hacked sites.
But something was different about these. Normally hackers hide their links in the posts with display:none tags so that the webmasters never actually see the bad links. It is a very effective strategy, but in this case they were fully exposed. So I checked another site that seemed to follow the same pattern.
In this example, the links were included in a post. It is very strange for a "hack" to follow such different patterns, sometimes dropping links sitewide and other times just in posts. So, it was time to investigate these anomalies. Off to one of my favorite sites, DomainTools.
For some reason, people still think that private registration is enough to cover all your tracks. Sure, it helps if you register a new domain and establish private registration at the point of acquiring the domain, but if at any point in your history you had accurate domain registration data, we can get to it. Anyone can. Using the DomainTools Registration History, we were able to track down the original registrant email address to [email protected]
A Quick Note on Outing
As you have no doubt noticed so far in this post, I am not going to out the perps. We know the motive, and we know the likely perpetrator, but I can't prove that the parent company knew of the actions, nor even that the SEOs responsible for their accounts were aware of the actions taken on their behalf. I will not allow myself to be responsible for the downfall of a company that may have merely been ignorant rather than malicious, and I certainly won't open myself up to false flag attacks. That being said, the likely culprits are members of this community, and I believe they have much to lose if they continue in their ways. I can't prevent you all from connecting the dots, but I won't paint the picture myself.
So, back to the Investigation.
Now that we had a domain, we had a strong position from which to catapult our investigation. We quickly turned the domain into a twitter account, a twitter account into a link building company out of India. Aside from Distilled, a seemingly random business liability website was lumped into the attack. We were able to determine that the likely culprit owned a site which competes directly with this business liability insurance site. But we were stuck, until my good friend came through and did a quick analysis of the perpetrator's follow list on Twitter.
After a cursory look, he was able to identify a stinging indictment. Of the 41 individuals the likely culprit was following on Twitter, two worked for a direct competitor of the targeted bingo sites, one of which was the CEO of the company and the other the head of Web Marketing. He also followed Distilled, perhaps waiting to see how they responded when the attack was revealed.
This isn't quite the smoking gun yet, though, because the connection is not reciprocal. It is a strong indication, but not a nail in the coffin so to speak. But, alas, twitter is only one social media site. After digging deeper and deeper, we were able to find direct conversations of a personal, non-business, nature between the head of Web Marketing for the competitor sites and the likely culprit on Google+.
Of course, this still only shows a link. But, as if the icing on the cake couldn't get any thicker, here is a nice comment the Director of Web Marketing left on a post about negative SEO just a few weeks ago. As you notice, he is contemplating Google's updated statement that negative SEO is possible. Seriously, could you make this any easier?
So, what exactly does the evidence tell us...
- A negative SEO attack was launched between May 20th and May 22nd of 2012 against several bingo sites, Distilled, and a business liability insurance site.
- The attack was likely created by an individual from India who owns a link building company.
- We know that who ever performed the attack had direct access to websites owned by the individual from India.
- That individual has direct connections with the CEO and Director of Web Marketing for a bingo website company.
- The Director of Web Marketing has reciprocated communication on social media sites with the individual likely responsible for the attack.
- The Director of Web Marketing responded with curiosity to Google's updated notation on negative SEO.
What do we not know?
- We don't know, for certain, that either the CEO or Director of Web Marketing requested these actions be taken.
- We don't know, for certain, that the individual who owns the link building company was directly responsible.
- Why did they target Distilled in the campaign? Did they assume Distilled was an SEO of record for one of their competitors?
The Aftermath
If you are a victim of negative SEO, there are a handful of steps you simply have to tag to prevent potential damage to your site.
- Download a complete list of links pointing to your site from Open Site Explorer.
- Mark any links in this list that came from the negative SEO attack.
- Submit these as a preemptive reconsideration request or via the feedback channel in Google Webmaster Tools.
- Use the Bing Webmaster Tools Disavow Tool immediately.
- Finally, if necessary, begin removing the bad links wherever possible. There are several tools to help out with this, including Virante's Remove 'Em, rMoov, or Richard Baxter's Excel Tool.
The Good News
At least at the moment, it appears that the negative SEO attack has been as effective as their ability to cover it up. For the time being, none of the sites appear to have been dramatically impacted by the campaign. However, with looming updates to Penguin, there is no telling. The best bet for any SEO is to stay on top of their backlinks, watching closely to make sure nothing nefarious makes its way into your profile.
Editor's Note
After the author wrote this post, Google announced a way to download your most recent links in Google Webmaster Tools that could prove very useful in this situation.
I'd be fascinated to know what steps the web spam team is taking to identify bad actors in this kind of scenario. They have much more powerful tools at their disposal (including no doubt timelines and private domain registration information). We have known about the inclusion of links to distilled in this attack for a while now. I'm pretty relaxed about our ability to get it in front of the right people and stand up for ourselves if it ever impacted us negatively. It's the small non-web-savvy businesses I worry about.
Good points. The biggest issue I see is every time Google decides to determine who is at fault, the open up the opportunity to be gamed. If they penalize rather than devalue bad links, they open the door for negative SEO. If they penalize the culprits of negative SEO, rather than devalue their actions, they open the door for false flag attacks - which is why I did not out the likely culprits here. Google's main goal needs to be to try and ignore as many crappy links out there as possible, regardless of motive. It is the only way to minimize collateral damage.
Totally agree, the algo should not let it get so far. A case of prevention not cure.
Absolutely agree.
The real worry is that those "small non-web-savvy businesses" not only have little ability to counter an attack, but are also, by their very nature, the easiest targets :(
Sha
Yep. And smart negative SEO folks will start hitting up sites that rank 11+, preventing them from reaching the first page AND doing so in a manner that makes it difficult if not impossible for webmasters to realize they have a penalty.
You makes a great point. So many small business owners don't know, or know just enough to be dangerous. They often don't have the time, SEO skills or money to uncover a negative SEO attack, or come up with a plan to counter it.
But in most cases, those businesses do not become the victims because they don't rank well to begin with ;-) No one is trying to penalize a site that only ranks #19
Another handy tool is the site spyonweb.com. It'll show you what other sites use that same IP address, GA account ID, and AdSense account ID. It's not a smoking gun, as if you had GA on a site then sold the site and transferred the GA account permissions (so the person kept all of the historical data) that ID is still lumped in with your other sites, but it is interesting to see connections.
Spyonweb.com is great! We definitely use it quite a bit but just didn't work out in this particular case.
Would you be able to put up a post on best ways to go about removing bad links? This would be killer for all us newbs to removing bad links!
I think that is a great idea. Hard to do without mentioning tools too much which do streamline the process. There is a pretty good post to help get you started here on SEOMoz...
Thanks for this. I am sure this will be helpful for us newbs.
Hey JS, Here's another one.
Yeah, should have pointed this one out. I guess this means I oweyou two a drink for forgetting that one. I actually just retweeted it a few minutes ago.
Hey Russ,
Nice post & good to see that good guys can not only finish first, but look a whole lot smarter in the end! ;)
Thanks for including rmoov in the post.
I do believe the request from JS also constitutes a little rattle of the cage for Ryan who I understand is working on a follow up to Identifying Link Penalties in 2012
Sha
Hi John,
We did a recent blog post about this on the Zazzle site
Hope this helps, if you have any questions - please shoot!
J
Hey, that is a really great article!
Hi, thanks for giving it a read and giving feedback :-)
JS- i've posted this on another moz post last week. I had one of my clients that bought a Fiverr blast without me knowing. We used LinkDelete.com and it was incredibly easy. Removed most of the links and submitted a reconsideration request in WMT. After scolding my client, we bounced back in the SERPS!
LOL...I like "after scolding the client" :)
Never really sure what is going to come out of the closet when a penalty hits, but one thing I know, it is always enlightening!
Sha
Hey folks, I'll do my best to respond to any questions down here for the rest of the day. Im on EST time so I'll be gone in a few hours, but I can resume tomorrow when I get back in the office.
A Hollywood ready cautionary tale. What are you going to call it?
Seeing as I am from NC, I vote "NCSEO". The double meaning is too tempting.
Would the 7 downvoters care to mention what concerns they might have?
They're probably the ones you caught! LOL
Haha! Totally @cyberlicious
From your privileged perspective, also being involved in Removeem.com, how much Negative SEO, which is not a really new nasty tactic, increased since the advent of Penguin?
It is hard to know since we don't really have a baseline before Penguin, but I think it is a pretty safe assumption. Luckily most negative SEO is being perpetrated by folks who don't know what they are doing, so their efforts are in vain. However, I am certain that with the right techniques negative SEO is very much possible.
Hi Gianluca,
I've spent a lot of time talking on the phone with rmoov users and have gotten the feeling that many really had no idea of what was happening with their backlink profile before the earth moved.
Even those who paid people to do "link building" really didn't ever have real information about what links were actually out there, so their knowledge of where links have come from is limited. The GWMT update which indicates when links were detected is helping to show up possible evidence of negative SEO, but even then, if people don't really know what their "link builders" were up to, nailing that down is still difficult.
Sha
Don't know why you bothered to hide the names and websites. It's pretty easy to figure out from the way you laid it out.
I also hope this gets Google's attention and they make an example out of this ring of 'gentlemen'.
Most people won't connect the dots and this post gets the point across without potentially wrongfully accusing one or many people. I can't prove which individuals are responsible, only in whose name they were apparently done.
Not sure why they would target distilled it doesn't help them rank better - Maybe they wanted to be famous for taking down distilled -lol
Great post as usual
That is another distinct possibility. With all of the talk lately of "does negative SEO work", a reputable company like Distilled might become a target. However, my gut instinct is that the perpetrators probably wrongly assumed that Distilled did SEO on behalf of one of those bingo companies.
Wow!! That was a amazing investigation. Frankly I was skeptical about a few of Google's updates, and this just strengthened my skepticism. Negative SEO has become such a real threat, that counteracting it has become a whole new business. Sad to see that the trail of these shady practices lead you to a Indian link building company. Such miscreants just lend a bad name to the country and the profession.
Found load of useful tools from your post and the discussions in the comments section. Great read :)
Thanks Russ, good to see this make the light of day! Hope Google catch up with Bing on the disavowal tool!
Agreed, but unfortunately the disavow tool will probably not be a get-out-of-jail-free card. My guess is Google will let you disavow some links but require you remove some more. Duane Forrester of Bing Webmaster Tools clarified this in a tweet, stating "Disavow is good, cleaning the mess is better. "
It wouldn't make sense any other way.
Afraid there are going to be a lot of very disappointed people if they are hanging on the hope that a disavow tool will solve all their Google problems.
I hope that it will at least strengthen reconsideration requests
I believe that it will strengthen them but, of course, you probably run the risk of disavowing links that Google has not yet determined to be manipulated. Probably an even trade, though, for the opportunity to get your rankings back.
There's a lot of talking about negative SEO, but is there any proof of this in the first place? I doubt it.
Google has updated their language in webmaster support to indicate that negative SEO is possible. There are also now multiple case studies indicating that, like regular SEO, some things in negative SEO work and some things don't.
I think you did a great job. Investigative reporter status with the knowledge to explain. And its definitely a great read. Keep more coming. Its is a great to police ourselves than to have the outside forces try to do it for us. It just shows that not everyone is out to perform bad seo practices and we can lead the way.
It is very sad that people are engaged in such black-hat techniques and negative seo to outrank their competitors. There should be some system in place where search engines like Google could detect the culprit and punish the comp[any. Second thing is that Google should offer mechanism to disavow links to webmasters.
However I am not in favor of using country specific allegations that many bloggers use. Negative seo may prevail in any part of the world irrespective the race and country.
Great article! Thank you for sharing some of the tools you used to investigate. Unfortunately, negative SEO will become another tactic that will separate the men from the boys. It's imperative to educate customers on this aspect of SEO and what can happen when legitimacy SEO companies are successful.
U R a sleuth! This is like CSI:Backlinks. I'm definitely gonna check out removeem!
Nice work
I would imagine people are going to keep using these tactics, especially if there isn't much recourse for something as blatant as this. It's frightening to think what a trained professional with a bit more 'black hat' tact could do as you pointed out. I have to believe Google has thought about this happening, and is working on solutions, whether it's a disavow tool or something a bit more sophisticated that doesn't require more work on the client side of things would be nice.
Well, the real permanent solution is for Google to simply get better at ignoring anchor text manipulated links, especially those placed via automation. This is what Google focused on for years and only in the last several months have they switched their tone to a more punitive approach, opening the door for negative SEO.
Absolutely fantastic post! Any ideas on how to track down a comment spammer? The negative SEO done by seemingly 1 person who pointed thousands of comment spam links at my site got me penalized. It has been very frustrating to say the least.
This is a little harder to do, but not impossible. Start by reaching out to the some of the spammed sites, especially if they are on wordpress, and see if you can find an IP address from which the spam comments were sent. If the spammer is smart, they would have used proxies, but many of them do not. This may help you pinpoint a geographic region. There are a lot of other things you can do, but chances are your best bet is to let Google know you were a victim of a negative SEO campaign. Bear in mind, if you were doing other types of link building, you will have to clean up anything that was against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Just because the negative SEO pushed you over the edge doesn't mean Google will turn a blind eye to other things you were doing.
I did notify Google that https://www.modamusic.com/lubs-latin-creamy-latin/ has been hacked and used to perform negative SEO on my domain but they have not replied or done anything about it.
I replied to a comment made by Matt Cutts on searchengineland and he didn't reply back.
Hello Russvirante and Thank You for great post.. I want to ask you do you think Google will launch disavow link tool this year or maybe next 2013 ?
I think they will in this calendar year, but my guess is that it you will still be expected to remove at least non-spam links (like paid links).
Great detective work to help all of us who are attacked by negative SEO. Any word on when Google will be releasing the disavow section in WMT?
no new word yet, but Bing's addition all but guarantees that GWT will at some point add it. We don't know how it will work though. It is most likely that google will expect you to still clean up some of your links, especially those that look paid and not spam.
I have just had a very similar situation. I found the same type of links pointing to our website and our competitors from several blogspot splogs just a week ago. I also traced them back and got some information about the possible initiator of the attack, but the data was insufficient.
I immediately sent a reconsideration request to Google, listing those links.
Thank you for sharing your experience.
Interesting investigation into negative SEO, the process of removing the bad links looks a bit grey.
With all these high quality investigative SEO posts popping up on Moz recently, I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA start recruiting here soon!
Nice work Russ =)
Hi I would like to know if you find that somebody using negative SEO against your site and you disavow these link using Bing Webmaster Tools Disavow Tool, will this link still be count by Google or no ???
I think the answer is "YES COUNT BY GOOGLE".
Exactly I am not using the Bing webmaster tool but I know that the Bing and Google, both are the different search engine that using his own algorithms. When we send the remove request from webmaster tool then the link is block by that search engine and not count into their SERP factor. But it is not affect to other search engine.
Wow @ targeting Distilled!
I think trying to discredit is the most likely scenario... maybe somebody who was outsourced to for some small task in years past, that's bearing a grudge for not being used any more?
My guess is the perpetrators wrongly assumed that Distilled was the SEO company behind one of their competitors.
Ah yes, that is more likely!
Negfative SEO is real. Since December I have observed a LOT of spammy links showing up for our site and for several competitor sites. I know that we have not sought these links, and strongly believe that our competitor's showing the same issues are competent SEO companies that would definitely not do this on their own.
I have seen ranking fluctuations to the point that I believe that "negative SEO can work". With Google monitoring link velocity, sources, etc. it's impossible to believe that they give anyone the benefit of a doubt when it comes to spammy linking.
Because we have not received an notices of manual actions we have no practical manner to combat the derelict negative SEO person(s). I wish we could add some sort of file to our server that would allow us to continually update our own "disavow list" and be crawled similar to a xml site map.
I found this post a little interesting to some extent as it involves a good time to do the process, and its not sure if it will work.
I am glad to know there are some tools that can be used to remove the backlinks. I have never used such tools, will they really work effectively?
Thanks for this post, I read it with the same excitement as I would have from reading a detective story. From my personal experience with clients being hit, I'm a 100% positive that negative SEO does work. Obviously I despise these practices, but I still feel people should know about them in order to respond to it.
Usually we see Scrapebox, xRumer spamming blogs and forums with one very competitive keyword as anchor text (no company name ever used whatsoever for the target site). With some neglected WordPress blogs showing comments site wide for a short period, it's a really damaging practice.
Even if forums are moderated, some spam links still tend to get picked up by the search engine because forums frequently have new content.
Nice investigation work. I can always appreciate an SEO Sleuth.
Fight fire with fire I say, I found someone doing negative SEO on me so I done it to them, simply returning the favor and not my usual practice but one thing I can assure you is I done it better than them and recovered from their negative efforts by simply adding extra diversity into my links.
Realy Great Article
Very interesting post as I am a complete novice in this arena, iI found it to be insightful and informative
Great post, Russ! And I can appreciate your reasoning behind not outing the firm. Good call, I'd say.
We know there's at least one member here that probably felt justified in voting down your post. :P A little difficult to understand what the rest found wrong with it, though. Regardless, thanks for taking the time to share it with everyone.
Thats a really really Great Post
Thanks jones for this information. that will very useful for me to start my another new website
I thought the post was great, it’s good to see people actually talking about the stuff that others stay away from.
Negative SEO is a real risk and in such an economic climate it’s not unheard of for less ethical companies to try this out on their competitors. We get calls every week about these types of attacks... some of them have been suffering the attack for over a year but never got the right advice from the SEOs they contacted.
SMEs and blue chips are at risk here and it is a genuine risk. Negative SEO is cheap, available and it works because Google lets it work!
I recently wrote two articles for TFMA Insights on this topic:-
https://www.tfmainsights.com/negative-seo-googles-war-websites/
www.tfmainsights.com/architecture-negative-seo-campaign/
Feel free to check them out and offer any feedback.
It's not uncommon to find Indian and Pakistan companies/individuals doing this.
Awesome investigation, I bet that made for a wicked day at the office!
yeah, it was a ton of fun.
Interesting but still hard to pinpoint. IMO. I do love your tip about using "Domain Tools Registration History" to look back in time.
It is amazing how many people don't know that unless they registered privately from day 1, there is a record out there with your previous registrant data. It is also a very useful trick when trying to track down an owner for other reasons - like reaching out for link removal or guest blog posting.
A part from spammers, SEO has a wider scope and will remain in future.
A part from spammers, SEO has a wider scope and will remain in future.
Nice read, Russ! Way to track down the breadcrumbs!
Unfortunately, it's going to take more than an algorithm to clean up the SERPs. There is a human element required to help the quality of the SERPs which is why I find it interesting that a high percentage of the SEO community will not report web spam or bad SEO to the major SEs. You even said you won't out them. But why not? Aren't they part of the problem? How is an algorithm going to catch things like this?
Oh, I got it. Schema.org can implement itemtype="https://schema.org/Negative-SEO" and itemtype="https://schema.org/Positive-SEO".
Time for the white hats to fight back, yes? Or are we going to continue to blame Google?
I don't out them for several reasons...
1. I don't know which individual is responsible. It is very possible that an angry SEO framed them, or a failing SEO did negative SEO because their real attempts weren't working. Ultimately, I have no proof that the bingo site owners contracted out to an individual to purchase negative SEO services.
2. There is no reason why an algo shouldn't have been able to catch the negative SEO used in this campaign.
3. White hats can protect themselves by simply sending Google a list of the links built without their permission. Ultimately, there should be a disavow tool to solve this.
4. I personally never thought that shame is the way our industry should go. We should be building up the good tactics, helping people build sites that are negative seo proof, not spending our time hunting down the handful of bad seeds and making a mockery of them. It is a waste of our talents and time.
Can't you leave #1 into the hands of the powers that be? You're not the one penalizing, the SEs are. They can investigate the "what ifs" you mention and decide for themselves.
For #2, are you a developer? Because that's developer speak. LOL Definitely, count me as one that looks forward to updates, too. But for every hole plugged, a new hole is formed.
Agree with #3, as you mentioned Bing's in your article.
Humans are involved for #4, right? Only in a perfect world as there are differences in the way we all see things. You did use your talents and time for this one though.
Great write up!
Got any recommendations on exactly how to send Google a list of unauthorized links (outside of the expected disavow tool?). I just uncovered a small, feeble attempt at negative SEO. It doesn't appear to have worked, but I don't think I am comfortable with waiting to see whether or not Google notices.
Matt CuttsJul 27, 2012 (edited) - Mobile
- PublicIf you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.
If we've taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries” feature Webmaster Tools for example. As always, if you believe you have been affected by a manual spam action and your site no longer violates the Webmaster Guidelines, go ahead and file a reconsideration request. It’ll take some time for us to process the request, but you will receive a followup message confirming when we’ve processed it.
Update: Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on this change. An engineer worked over the weekend based on the suggestions here, and starting on Sunday we made two changes so you can tell the "individual links aren't trusted" messages from the "our opinion of your entire site is affected" messages.
First off, we changed the messages themselves that we'll send out to make it clear that for a specific incident "we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole." So anyone that gets a message going forward can tell what type of action has occurred.
The second change is that these messages won't show the yellow caution sign in our webmaster console at https://google.com/webmasters/ like our other webspam notifications. This reflects the fact that these actions are much more targeted and don't always require action by the site owner.
Thanks again for the feedback, and we'll continue to work on ways to provide more useful and actionable information for site owners.
Update 2: We sent out the updated, more precise messages this past Sunday. We hope these messages are clearer because the newer messages specify if we've taken action on individual links to the site rather than on the entire site.
In addition, we did some more work this week and today we’re deleting the out-of-date messages that caused the initial confusion, so site owners won’t have two messages about the same issue appearing in Webmaster Tools.
Thanks, but I didn't get a warning on these links (yet). Not too worried, but a way to send a list that won't fit into a reconsideration request would be nice - especially since there is not anything to reconsider at this time.
During the investigation of where these came from and who did it, I also uncovered a large number of spamblogs that don't appear to have been caught/devalued yet which this d-bag competitor is currently using. Would love to forward that list to the webspam team, too. One at a time webspam reports aren't worth the hassle.
The Schema is a good idea, but who in their right mind would use "negative-seo" and put up the big flag? Or was that a joke that I just missed?
It seems to me that instances like this will just push search engines to focus more on authorship. I guess that could be gamed too, to link spam posts to someone's G+ or FB profile, although it'd be much harder....
It was definitely a joke...LOL
Yes, smart people can always figure out a way to manipulate. It's the life of a hacker. Doing things someone says they couldn't. Now you've challenged them, good job: "although it'd be much harder...." ;-)
Thanks for detailing the process used to identify the spammers. Very informative and educational.
Hello Russ!
Good to see your post as i have been identifying various techniques and methods to cope with a negative SEO or a Hacking attack to one of my clients website https://bit.ly/eda6ym which is suffering from Google search index manipulation. How can a Viagra selling site use sneaky redirects to Google's cache URLs and get their URLs indexed for your website results. See below as i asked @mattcutts, @dannysullivan, @randfish and various GWT professionals and team workers but couldn't get an answer :(
As asked on Google+, A Viagra selling site using a sneaky redirect and manipulating #Google serps.https://goo.gl/Odifn
Well explained post, I wonder why some users voted down your post? maybe they are feeling guilty...
Well, what do you know...
“Fetch as Googlebot” tool helps to debug hacked sites by Matt Cutts.
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/fetch-as-googlebot-tool-hacked-sites/
Some excellent sleuthing! Glad you got to the bottom of it and good that you shared the methodology (and additional points in the comments).
It's such a waste of time to participate in negative SEO. Success takes a long steady time to build. If you're impatient and want to take shortcuts, get out of the game period. You can't sustain quick wins in any facet of life. SEO is an animal of epic Google proportions and for certain you'll be sniffed out eventually.
Do the right thing, and keep moving.
Yeah, positively agree; you make great points about negative SEO
Good to see these expalined against spammers :) mostly seo companies (not all) are doing like same activities, may be unknown exact meaning of SEO. Extremely sorry!!
Amazing Knowledge
Black hat sucks the most irritating thing I have seen is footprint, how can i use it? i dun think I can i get ranking if the spammer use this kind shits :@