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Google Panda Recovery: Negative SEO

By Julie King |

What recourse does a site have if someone pretends to represent it, and then does everything wrong - from a search engine optimization viewpoint - on purpose?

One disturbing trend that was identified in the process of doing our audit was the possibility of “negative SEO” campaigns.

Apparently when starting out, some sites would rather tear down the leaders with shady (or possibly illegal) tactics rather than invest the time and effort needed to create good quality, high ranked content and build natural, inbound links.

There were some initial flags that indicate that CanadaOne’s Panda hit may have been a partial target of a negative SEO.

The first indicator was a series of 3,000+ links from two websites that the team at CanadaOne had never heard of or solicited links from. Link removal requests have been issued, but to date the links still appear in GWT.

A second website had two separate instances where it had hundreds of links pointed at CanadaOne in GWT, while we could only find a single, legitimate page on the actual websites. This case appears to be a legitimate error, as it is a site that handles international shipping referring to a single article on CanadaOne about importing goods from the US to Canada. At least we hope that is the case.

Reliable SEO shared a blog post where someone posted the story of how they allegedly ran a negative SEO campaign (nSEO) that resulted in one of the top sites delisted for the keywords ‘used cars’ in the UK. Here is a brief excerpt from that post:

“We have managed to totally destroy a credible site with decent page rank, age, traffic and some-what authority.  … The keyword targets were all the major ones, used cars, used cars for sale, value my car, car valuation, used Nissan, used Honda etc…. Everyone of them is now totally out of the listings.”

While we have not detected anything as extreme as this example, the combination of scraped content and thousands of links that we did not request leave us concerned. Not only for our own situation, but for how easy it seems to be now to focus on tearing down a leader rather than going through the process needed to legitimately rise in the rankings.

It is early days still in terms of nSEO, but until search engines catch up and can properly screen for intentionally disruptive activities like this, nSEO will be an ongoing concern for websites that have legitimately built their rankings based on high quality content with organic, inbound links.

Page 1:Google Panda Report: Introduction

Page 2: Google Panda Report: Understanding How Google Views Duplicate or Thin Content

Page 3: Google Panda Report: Site Focus

Page 4: Google Panda Report: Site Architecture

Page 5: Google Panda Report: Site Clean-Up with Google Webmaster Tools (previous)

Page 6: Google Panda Report: Negative SEO

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