How to destroy your youtube competition!

10 years ago

I find it interesting that Google/Youtube has created this new form of negative SEO.

I suspect the next year or two will be a bit ugly. But soon they will realize what is happening and update the algorithm to treat spammy links, fake views, and etc as neutral vs. negative.

But right now there is huge market potential on the short term for negative SEO. I'm sorry your client got hit by this. And while I would never personally use these tactics I do understand why some agencies are doing it.

But like using spammy links for positive results in the long term it won't last. Google does not like people who explot the system. The question is only a matter of when they will fix this. The link disavow tool (never personally used) is not enough IMO. They will be forced to address this.

But for now it's not a big enough problem. But once it starts effecting their end users (searchers) more they will address it.

BTW love the fact that a 74 year old is offering these marketing services.

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shockwave 10 years ago

You should check out the SEO section of the Forum. You'll find that Yukon is a big proponent of ranking your own hosted video on your own website rather than using YouTube. He explains how to do it too.

Myself, I do the YT thing. I also go into with the mindset that it will only be a short term gain. So luckily, I can scale up a new channel with hundreds of videos quickly if disaster strikes. However, I've also noticed that some of my channels are get whacked more frequently than they have in the past.

I think YT is catching on to this whole thing and we will probably all have to do the hosted video on our website route if we want to have any long term or short term gains.
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Andrew S

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Aaron Doud

I find it interesting that Google/Youtube has created this new form of negative SEO.

To be fair, they didn't create it, it's a by-product of no longer ignoring the junk links and valuing the rest. In the good old days you could blast the heck out of whatever you wanted and it would rank well. I miss those days too.

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Aaron Doud

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Andrew S

To be fair, they didn't create it, it's a by-product of no longer ignoring the junk links and valuing the rest. In the good old days you could blast the heck out of whatever you wanted and it would rank well. I miss those days too.

Disagree. They choose now not to ignore them but to assign a negative value to them. That is the problem. If they were ignored they would have no effect, positive or negative, on SEO.

Right now they have a negative effect which allows people to do negative SEO on their competitors.

Of course Google may want that in hopes that all the bad sites will attack each other. The problem is that good people will get lost in the crossfire.

They are better solutions but Google choose what amounts to a scorched earth policy

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iAmNameLess

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Aaron Doud

Disagree. They choose now not to ignore them but to assign a negative value to them. That is the problem. If they were ignored they would have no effect, positive or negative, on SEO.

Right now they have a negative effect which allows people to do negative SEO on their competitors.

Of course Google may want that in hopes that all the bad sites will attack each other. The problem is that good people will get lost in the crossfire.

They are better solutions but Google choose what amounts to a scorched earth policy

Google does in fact ignore most links, without causing them to negatively affect you. The problem though is, it is the webmaster's job to stay on top of that, reach out to website owners to remove the junk links, and as a last resort, disavow the bad links.

For the most part, you will not be able to negatively affect a website's rankings with negative SEO. I've tried it with over 800,000 spam backlinks and in some cases the website has risen with certain terms.

There are only a few, VERY RARE situations where there is a negative effect. This is the most misunderstood concept in the SEO community. Just because you had certain link strategies in place and your website was ranking well, then the algorithm changed and you're now a few pages back, they assume what they did had negative effects. It isn't a negative effect, it is usually a neutral effect that used to be positive. When something is no longer positively affecting your rankings, your rankings take a hit. It's not a penalty, or negative SEO, it's just something that was helping you rank previously, is no longer helping you rank.

People would do much better with SEO if they forget about what they think is link building. Switch your focus to on page optimization, and marketing, and you'll have much better results.

As for the youtube issue... youtube is pretty much immune to any spam backlinks, fake plays though and they will crack down on you. Usually they remove the plays instead of not showing the video in search.

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blackfootprincesswarrior

10 years ago

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

Google does in fact ignore most links, without causing them to negatively affect you. The problem though is, it is the webmaster's job to stay on top of that, reach out to website owners to remove the junk links, and as a last resort, disavow the bad links.

For the most part, you will not be able to negatively affect a website's rankings with negative SEO. I've tried it with over 800,000 spam backlinks and in some cases the website has risen with certain terms.

There are only a few, VERY RARE situations where there is a negative effect. This is the most misunderstood concept in the SEO community. Just because you had certain link strategies in place and your website was ranking well, then the algorithm changed and you're now a few pages back, they assume what they did had negative effects. It isn't a negative effect, it is usually a neutral effect that used to be positive. When something is no longer positively affecting your rankings, your rankings take a hit. It's not a penalty, or negative SEO, it's just something that was helping you rank previously, is no longer helping you rank.

People would do much better with SEO if they forget about what they think is link building. Switch your focus to on page optimization, and marketing, and you'll have much better results.

As for the youtube issue... youtube is pretty much immune to any spam backlinks, fake plays though and they will crack down on you. Usually they remove the plays instead of not showing the video in search.

Thanks beginners like myself read all this and just want to give up. Your post sounds logical.

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ScottyM2 10 years ago

I was just going through a new course released by someone most of you know (Ray the Video Guy) and he mentions videos being deleted if audited and found to have fake views. Also found this YouTube clamps down on 'fake video views' - Telegraph
and much more if you do a bit of googling. Seems like using this in reverse would be a shitty way to take out the competition, just as the thread starter said. Pure ugly.
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RedShifted

10 years ago

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

For the most part, you will not be able to negatively affect a website's rankings with negative SEO. I've tried it with over 800,000 spam backlinks and in some cases the website has risen with certain terms.

How many times did you run this test?

How long did each test last? 3 days? 3 weeks? 3 months?

What is your definition of "Neg SEO"? Did you try to overoptimize their main phrase, or a different phrase?

What % was the main anchor text at when you stopped? 8%? 20%? 80%?

Did you target just the home page or back pages as well?

It took 2 months to take down 1 site and that was the first time I ever tried NSEO.

I reoptimized all the sites main anchor text to over 60% (for the main phrases that the site actually targets). But I started slow and gradual. And I targeted more than just the home page. I didn't just start blasting thousands of links on every page. I gradually increased the speed so it appeared somewhat natural. Then I reported the site to Google. Site went bye bye. That was my first try ever.

I'm running more tests right now trying different techniques. And there are some really good techniques on BHW if you read.

The goal of NSEO isn't just to build spammy backlinks. Its to identify vulnerabilities that a site has, and exploit them. You can target all of a sites best backlinks, then submit a DMCA to have all those pages taken down. There is a technique on BHW that inteferes with Google cache so a site gets immediately deindexed.

But the point is, there are marketers who have been practicing NSEO for years. And there are multiple ways of executing it. Does your competitor have a prominent G Local? You can drop a review bomb and get their whole listing flagged. YT videos are much easier. Just order 1 fiver gig and you can get a video taken down. Or steal a script off BHW that is known to be patched.

Furthermore, if you feel so strongly... saying "For the most part, you will not be able to negatively affect a website's rankings with negative SEO", when 90% of sites are known to have vulnerabilities, then please pm me a site you don't need anymore. A site you believe is secure. Then give me 2-3 months and let me beat it up.

Afterwards I can post it as a NSEO case study in the SEO section.

-RS

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iAmNameLess

10 years ago

Originally Posted by RedShifted

It took 2 months to take down 1 site and that was the first time I ever tried NSEO.

The goal of NSEO isn't just to build spammy backlinks. Its to identify vulnerabilities that a site has, and exploit them. You can target all of a sites best backlinks, then submit a DMCA to have all those pages taken down. There is a technique on BHW that inteferes with Google cache so a site gets immediately deindexed.

Furthermore, if you feel so strongly... saying "For the most part, you will not be able to negatively affect a website's rankings with negative SEO", when 90% of sites are known to have vulnerabilities, then please pm me a site you don't need anymore. A site you believe is secure. Then give me 2-3 months and let me beat it up.

Afterwards I can post it as a NSEO case study in the SEO section.

-RS

#1 - Correlation is not causation.
#2 - You can't submit a DMCA on all backlinks, that's crap and you should know better than to believe hype on BHW.
#3 - The technique you're referring to was about an 18 hour glitch that was fixed a long time ago, other country versions of Google took anywhere from 8 hours to 4 days to get fixed. lol.

I promise you, you will not be able to harm any rankings on any site I have. PM me your email address and I'll send you an NDA and you can go to town. I'll even give you a considerable amount of $ if you are able to do it.

There is only one form of negative SEO that consistently works, and it's nothing that anyone on this forum or BHW has been talking about. PHP/MYSQL injections in the common CMS platforms.

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savidge4

10 years ago

I personally have a problem with this conversation. I personally have a real big problem with people that admit to using negative SEO and are proud of it.

Its akin to in the real world slashing a guys tires once a week so he misses work, if you do it enough the guy will loose his job.

I personally look to those that outrank me with respect. I look deeper into what they are doing, so that I may follow and do the same, and work towards the same or similar results.

EVERY single listing on a search engine has a face behind it. Someone just like yourself that wants to get ahead in the world, and is using the internet to attempt to do so.

I personally find it outright sickening to think that people are so lame at what they do, that they feel they need to use NSEO to get ahead. Ahead at the expense of others.

I find it sad that this conversation has gone unchecked by the moderators, and RedShifted has not lost his account!

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ScottyM2

10 years ago

Originally Posted by savidge4

I personally have a problem with this conversation. I personally have a real big problem with people that admit to using negative SEO and are proud of it.

Its akin to in the real world slashing a guys tires once a week so he misses work, if you do it enough the guy will loose his job.

I personally look to those that outrank me with respect. I look deeper into what they are doing, so that I may follow and do the same, and work towards the same or similar results.

EVERY single listing on a search engine has a face behind it. Someone just like yourself that wants to get ahead in the world, and is using the internet to attempt to do so.

I personally find it outright sickening to think that people are so lame at what they do, that they feel they need to use NSEO to get ahead. Ahead at the expense of others.

I find it sad that this conversation has gone unchecked by the moderators, and RedShifted has not lost his account!

Agreed, makes me sick as well. Redshifted is an internet virus. F'ing scum. However, I'm glad this topic was brought to light. Maybe something can be done about it. I hope that Iamnameless is correct in his assessments.

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Underground

10 years ago

Originally Posted by savidge4

I personally have a problem with this conversation. I personally have a real big problem with people that admit to using negative SEO and are proud of it.

Its akin to in the real world slashing a guys tires once a week so he misses work, if you do it enough the guy will loose his job.

I personally look to those that outrank me with respect. I look deeper into what they are doing, so that I may follow and do the same, and work towards the same or similar results.

EVERY single listing on a search engine has a face behind it. Someone just like yourself that wants to get ahead in the world, and is using the internet to attempt to do so.

I personally find it outright sickening to think that people are so lame at what they do, that they feel they need to use NSEO to get ahead. Ahead at the expense of others.

I find it sad that this conversation has gone unchecked by the moderators, and RedShifted has not lost his account!

Yeah, these people are embarrassing, cringeworthy scum. I do detect a bit of surprise in your post though. Have you seen the standard of work alot of these dorks produce for their customers? A million miles away from approaching how a respectable marketing agency operate. It shouldn't be a surprise.

Crappy HTML sites, piss poor marketing solutions, just a ******* joke. I'm not surprised that these cretins approach marketing with the mindset they have.

They'll never be professionals and do things properly. Bottom-feeding chancers. I'm not surprised, but that doesn't mean I find them any more palatable. Imagine hiring idiots like these people to take care of your marketing. They'd trash your company.

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DaniMc

10 years ago

Originally Posted by savidge4

I personally find it outright sickening to think that people are so lame at what they do, that they feel they need to use NSEO to get ahead. Ahead at the expense of others.

I find it sad that this conversation has gone unchecked by the moderators, and RedShifted has not lost his account!

Originally Posted by ScottyM2

Agreed, makes me sick as well. Redshifted is an internet virus. F'ing scum.

Originally Posted by Underground

Yeah, these people are embarrassing, cringeworthy scum.

So much negativity. I think the dialogue between Red and Nameless adds value to the forum and calling names is really not the type of activity that is productive. I'd be surprised if one of you isn't banned or warned for this type of personal attack.

I understand what you are saying, and you have reasons for feeling the way that you do. However, I think you are being a bit closed minded.

You can't think of any reason you would need to destroy a ranking site, and still be ethical?

I can. For example:
1) Spam websites where your competitor has posted defamatory content about your business, and then ranked it. I have seen this before. Complete dirty attacks against good people. Knowing a way to remove that site would be a gift.

2) Extortion websites that will post a negative review about your company, and then try to make you pay to remove it. There are many sites like this that operate on the fringe of the law, but well beyond the line of ethics and morals.

3) Embarrassing content - So now you are a successful exec and someone found embarrassing photos of you from college 20 years ago. It's ranking high for your name. Your reputation depends on removing the content. People face this regularly and a good reputation management company will know how to help.

4) Speaking of reputation management - the entire premise requires knowledge of how to devalue bad stories in the search engines and replace them with positive content. A fully ethical practice.

5) Personal attacks - I knew of one exec who beat another in a high stakes bidding process. The next thing you know, spam blogs were going up from anonymous accounts destroying this person's reputation. Knowing how to fix that would be a godsend for many.

I for one, find this sort of case study to be useful and informative. It's like ethical hacking. Sometimes you can deploy nefarious tools and methods to do good.

I'm looking forward to the results. And I hope you guys will consider helping the internet be a better place by not calling people "scum" just because the scope of their work is outside of yours.

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Rus Sells

10 years ago

Hey Dan,

1, 3, & 5 can be quickly addressed with a take down notice. Spam not required.

#2 Isn't on the fringe of the law, it is against the law.

Take down notice are pretty effective if you do them right. I've had sites literally 100% blocked from ALL internet access until certain offending content was removed. Happened in a matter of hours.

In my opinion if you're fighting spam with spam it's wasted energy.

Originally Posted by Dan McCoy

So much negativity. I think the dialogue between Red and Nameless adds value to the forum and calling names is really not the type of activity that is productive. I'd be surprised if one of you isn't banned or warned for this type of personal attack.

I understand what you are saying, and you have reasons for feeling the way that you do. However, I think you are being a bit closed minded.

You can't think of any reason you would need to destroy a ranking site, and still be ethical?

I can. For example:
1) Spam websites where your competitor has posted defamatory content about your business, and then ranked it. I have seen this before. Complete dirty attacks against good people. Knowing a way to remove that site would be a gift.

2) Extortion websites that will post a negative review about your company, and then try to make you pay to remove it. There are many sites like this that operate on the fringe of the law, but well beyond the line of ethics and morals.

3) Embarrassing content - So now you are a successful exec and someone found embarrassing photos of you from college 20 years ago. It's ranking high for your name. Your reputation depends on removing the content. People face this regularly and a good reputation management company will know how to help.

4) Speaking of reputation management - the entire premise requires knowledge of how to devalue bad stories in the search engines and replace them with positive content. A fully ethical practice.

5) Personal attacks - I knew of one exec who beat another in a high stakes bidding process. The next thing you know, spam blogs were going up from anonymous accounts destroying this person's reputation. Knowing how to fix that would be a godsend for many.

I for one, find this sort of case study to be useful and informative. It's like ethical hacking. Sometimes you can deploy nefarious tools and methods to do good.

I'm looking forward to the results. And I hope you guys will consider helping the internet be a better place by not calling people "scum" just because the scope of their work is outside of yours.

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DaniMc

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Rus Sells

1, 3, & 5 can be quickly addressed with a take down notice. Spam not required.

#2 Isn't on the fringe of the law, it is against the law.

I'm sure you are right in many cases. But, people are entitled to post their opinions about others and there isn't anything that can be done about it legally.

The photos posted belong to the photographer, and they have a right to post them.

Ripoff Report is notorious for their profitable extortion program. There are clones.

In business sometimes things go wrong, partnerships break-up, a customer has a bad experience and doesn't like the outcome - these people sometime go on a tear writing things about a business that really do not characterize the entire business.

I don't see any ethical issues with doing whatever necessary to force things like this to the 50th page of results, or to remove it altogether. Bombing a YouTube video that is harming a clients business seems very useful, especially if it is just someone being hateful because they didn't get exactly what they want.

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Rus Sells

10 years ago

Defamation is a general term for liable and slander. In the context of this we're talking about liable which is the written word.

So if you wrote a book and I read it and then said Dan's book was the most horrible book I've ever read, don't buy it. That's an opinion because no one can prove it to be wrong or right.

But if I said, I read Dan's book and he basically stole the story line and content from another author and it was horrible anyways don't buy it. Now that can be liable especially if I make the statement knowing it's false and even more so if you can prove I'm wrong. = )

In regards to photo's yes the photographer does have copyrights but it also depends on where the photo was taken. In a public place, if so then there's no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Photos taken from the street for example that show people inside their home then there's possibly a legal issue as people have a certain expectation to their right to privacy, even if window drapes are open.

So it really does come down to a case by case situation and painting a broad picture isn't reality.

Originally Posted by Dan McCoy

I'm sure you are right in many cases. But, people are entitled to post their opinions about others and there isn't anything that can be done about it legally.

The photos posted belong to the photographer, and they have a right to post them.

Ripoff Report is notorious for their profitable extortion program. There are clones.

In business sometimes things go wrong, partnerships break-up, a customer has a bad experience and doesn't like the outcome - these people sometime go on a tear writing things about a business that really do not characterize the entire business.

I don't see any ethical issues with doing whatever necessary to force things like this to the 50th page of results, or to remove it altogether. Bombing a YouTube video that is harming a clients business seems very useful, especially if it is just someone being hateful because they didn't get exactly what they want.

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Underground

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Dan McCoy

So much negativity. I think the dialogue between Red and Nameless adds value to the forum and calling names is really not the type of activity that is productive. I'd be surprised if one of you isn't banned or warned for this type of personal attack.

I understand what you are saying, and you have reasons for feeling the way that you do. However, I think you are being a bit closed minded.

You can't think of any reason you would need to destroy a ranking site, and still be ethical?

I can. For example:
1) Spam websites where your competitor has posted defamatory content about your business, and then ranked it. I have seen this before. Complete dirty attacks against good people. Knowing a way to remove that site would be a gift.

2) Extortion websites that will post a negative review about your company, and then try to make you pay to remove it. There are many sites like this that operate on the fringe of the law, but well beyond the line of ethics and morals.

3) Embarrassing content - So now you are a successful exec and someone found embarrassing photos of you from college 20 years ago. It's ranking high for your name. Your reputation depends on removing the content. People face this regularly and a good reputation management company will know how to help.

4) Speaking of reputation management - the entire premise requires knowledge of how to devalue bad stories in the search engines and replace them with positive content. A fully ethical practice.

5) Personal attacks - I knew of one exec who beat another in a high stakes bidding process. The next thing you know, spam blogs were going up from anonymous accounts destroying this person's reputation. Knowing how to fix that would be a godsend for many.

I for one, find this sort of case study to be useful and informative. It's like ethical hacking. Sometimes you can deploy nefarious tools and methods to do good.

I'm looking forward to the results. And I hope you guys will consider helping the internet be a better place by not calling people "scum" just because the scope of their work is outside of yours.

If it is for those reasons, then fine. If it is to tear down competitors who do things well and have got rankings through hard work, then people like that are scum.

If you don't think so now, you soon would if you were in the OP's position and someone did it to your hard work.

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RedShifted

10 years ago

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

#1 - Correlation is not causation.

You should have stated that in your own post before you started talking about the case study you did.

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

#2 - You can't submit a DMCA on all backlinks, that's crap and you should know better than to believe hype on BHW.

You're just playing semantics. "All" is an obvious error. But it still doesn't disprove the basic fact that DMCAs do hurt your rankings >> as stated directly by Google.

Also, I initially read about it on Search Engine Land but you can find many stories on BHW

Google's new plan to fight piracy!

Sandboxing the competition

The world "all" may be hype but DMCAs hurting your rankings is true.

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

#3 - The technique you're referring to was about an 18 hour glitch that was fixed a long time ago, other country versions of Google took anywhere from 8 hours to 4 days to get fixed. lol.

It was NOT "fixed" a long time ago dude. Stop pretending to know everything about SEO. I read a story about this on BHW just a month ago:

New Negative SEO Attack Using Google

Thats the last link I cite cause I'm not doing more research for you. You don't seem to spend much time on BHW. Or other forums in general. I read a lot more forums than just WF because I want to know what EVERYONE is saying, not just WF.

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

I promise you, you will not be able to harm any rankings on any site I have. PM me your email address and I'll send you an NDA and you can go to town. I'll even give you a considerable amount of $ if you are able to do it.

Ok will do. And I don't need a money reward. But if you reward me with permission to post it as a case study on WF thats all the incentive I need.

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

There is only one form of negative SEO that consistently works, and it's nothing that anyone on this forum or BHW has been talking about. PHP/MYSQL injections in the common CMS platforms.

If there is more than 1 way to rank a site, there is certainly more than 1 way to take down a site. Math would dictate that it has to be. If there is more than 1 way to cook an egg, then there is more than 1 way to eat an egg. If there is more than 1 way to take a shit (toilet, bucket, coffee can) there is more than 1 way to dispose of a shit (flush, bag it, bury).

I will be contacting you shortly. -_-

-RS

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iAmNameLess

10 years ago

Originally Posted by RedShifted

You should have stated that in your own post before you started talking about the case study you did.

You're just playing semantics. "All" is an obvious error. But it still doesn't disprove the basic fact that DMCAs do hurt your rankings >> as stated directly by Google.

Also, I initially read about it on Search Engine Land but you can find many stories on BHW

Google's new plan to fight piracy!

Sandboxing the competition

The world "all" may be hype but DMCAs hurting your rankings is true.

It was NOT "fixed" a long time ago dude. Stop pretending to know everything about SEO. I read a story about this on BHW just a month ago:

New Negative SEO Attack Using Google

Thats the last link I cite cause I'm not doing more research for you. You don't seem to spend much time on BHW. Or other forums in general. I read a lot more forums than just WF because I want to know what EVERYONE is saying, not just WF.

Ok will do. And I don't need a money reward. But if you reward me with permission to post it as a case study on WF thats all the incentive I need.

If there is more than 1 way to rank a site, there is certainly more than 1 way to take down a site. Math would dictate that it has to be. If there is more than 1 way to cook an egg, then there is more than 1 way to eat an egg. If there is more than 1 way to take a shit (toilet, bucket, coffee can) there is more than 1 way to dispose of a shit (flush, bag it, bury).

I will be contacting you shortly. -_-

-RS

1.) It wasn't just one case study. I tried covering all angles and am confident what most believe is negative SEO, is a bunch of BS.

2.) YES! DMCA's do hurt your rankings, but do you know what a DMCA is for? IF you get a DMCA request you have bigger issues than SEO. It's not an effective tactic for removing backlinks, the most effective tactic to affect someone else's backlinks, is to dilute the backlinks.

3.) The bug with the Google cache was an issue a long time ago, that is clearly not what you're referring to. You're talking about someone and linked to a thread where the guy was getting a DOS attack. It may not have even been him that was getting attacked, but the server block he was on.

4.) I really don't care what everyone is saying, it's irrelevant. Everyone is still preaching about no follow vs. dofollow... forum backlinks, guest blogging, etc. I care what my own results show.

5.) I don't know everything about SEO, but I do know a lot. SEO has always been my bread and butter and has been for the last 4-5 years.

6.) You can post the case study but you can't use the name or show any links, I'll get you an NDA shortly.

http://youtu.be/HWJUU-g5U_I

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misterme

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Ragz

his views jumped to 1200, then 1800, then 3500... he was elated

He was elated even though they were, unknown to him, spammy views, but known to him was the fact that none of them were ringing his phone.

So why was he elated? Because he thought he won a popularity contest?

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Aaron Doud

10 years ago

Ian thanks for the update.

I've heard multiple people saying they have used negative SEO or been a victim of it.

But if they are ignored (the correct way to handle them) I don't see the issue with spammy links.

Why do they have the link disavow tool if spammy links have no negative effect?

EDIT: Looks like spammy links do hurt. Right from google's mouth. Article below sumerizes the video and google video is linked inside article.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article...Been-Penalized

Basically you can kill any of your competition who don't know how to use the disavow tool.
Seems to me that negative SEO is a real thing and a problem that Google isn't really addressing.

Spammy links should be neutral not negative. But google wants to punish people so they are treated them as a negative.

I admit I am no SEO expert but this seems like a pretty cut and dry case. Perhaps Negative SEO is hard to pull off but do you think that will stop people who truly want to do it.

After all the same tools that made blackhat SEO a thing will make negative SEO possible.

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iAmNameLess 10 years ago

Originally Posted by Aaron Doud

Why do they have the link disavow tool if spammy links have no negative effect?

In case some of the links were part of a link network targeted by the big G. Helps them identify link networks. The reason for the disavow tool anyway is just for them to collect more data.
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iAmNameLess

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Aaron Doud

Ian thanks for the update.

I've heard multiple people saying they have used negative SEO or been a victim of it.

But if they are ignored (the correct way to handle them) I don't see the issue with spammy links.

Why do they have the link disavow tool if spammy links have no negative effect?

EDIT: Looks like spammy links do hurt. Right from google's mouth. Article below sumerizes the video and google video is linked inside article.

Matt Cutts: Use the Link Disavow Tool Even if Your Site Hasn't Been Penalized - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

Basically you can kill any of your competition who don't know how to use the disavow tool.
Seems to me that negative SEO is a real thing and a problem that Google isn't really addressing.

Spammy links should be neutral not negative. But google wants to punish people so they are treated them as a negative.

I admit I am no SEO expert but this seems like a pretty cut and dry case. Perhaps Negative SEO is hard to pull off but do you think that will stop people who truly want to do it.

After all the same tools that made blackhat SEO a thing will make negative SEO possible.

Actually, he never said anything about the links hurting you, he said if you were worried about negative SEO, then use the disavow. He doesn't say the disavow will even protect you, he never even acknowledges negative SEO is a real thing, just that people are concerned about it.

"If you are at all worried about someone trying to do negative SEO or it looks like there's some weird bot that's building up a bunch of links to your site and you have no idea where it came from, that's the perfect time to use disavow as well,"

Like I said... another way to collect data for the big G. It helps the web spam team identify typically low quality links that even webmaster don't want to have.

There's a difference between the concept of negative SEO and negative effects of certain SEO techniques. For example... if I built 50,000 backlinks for the RV dealership, and they all came from sites about cookies, recipes, politics, etc. you would probably think that is negative SEO... if you were ranking #1 for RV dealership in (insert city) and the anchor text was the same as your keyword, it still wouldn't matter, you'd rank just fine. Now if you have hidden backlinks on that site with anchor text about porn, or free porn videos, with insanely high keyword density, you will not be penalized for the keyword density issue but you will be penalized for the hidden backlinks.

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BlueIndigo

10 years ago

Originally Posted by Ragz

As of the last few months, anyone that purchases views for their Youtube video has been getting bitch-slapped by youtube.

Someone obviously bought a ton of views for my client, not to help, but to get him knocked off the map.

Everyone's talking about backlinks... looks like all it takes to knock a competitor off the grid is to buy views for their youtube video. How crappy is that?

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celente 10 years ago

Originally Posted by BlueIndigo

Everyone's talking about backlinks... looks like all it takes to knock a competitor off the grid is to buy views for their youtube video. How crappy is that?

yup google can pick up on this, and there are still 1000's of people doing it. You can see newbie warriors asking how people get so many views, well, its just bot traffic, and GOOGLE now class that as spammy traffic / tactics. They can pick up on this, and can even ban accoutns for it.

I would def not engage in buying views, google will be clamping down on this real hard soon, Is my best guess.
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bodyrock 10 years ago

Originally Posted by BlueIndigo

Everyone's talking about backlinks... looks like all it takes to knock a competitor off the grid is to buy views for their youtube video. How crappy is that?

Buying views for your videos is like playing with fire. At the beginning everybody is watching you, because you are the center of attention. However, you can get burned in a matter of seconds, and then everything goes down. The more inexperienced you are with playing with fire, the bigger the chances are for you to get burned.

When we talk about YouTube videos, if the channel is new and with no (or little) authority, it's easier to get its videos taken down with negative SEO, or other black hat practices such as fake views. But if you try to take down a video from some of the top channels (like VEVO channels, Smosh, etc.) you will have a hard time and at the end you will just lose your time and money/efforts.

So the best defence against negative practices is making your YouTube channel authority enough. How do you do this? With crazy linkbuilding?... NO! You do this by using the "fruits" YouTube itself gives you. The best fruit I have found so far, is the one nobody speaks about (probably because they don't want it to be revealed) - CHANNEL FEATURING!

The "Featured Channels" section is where the pure gold is when it comes to YouTube SEO. Open the YouTube channel of Rihanna - youtube.com/user/RihannaVEVO, check out its page rank - it's PR9! Now use the nodofollow addon of Mozilla and check the channels from the "Featured Channels" section - they turn blue, which means they are dofollow. So these channels get dofollow backlinks with PR9 straight from YouTube. Even more than this, if the name of your channel is also your targeted keyword, let say "Walking Shoes", the link gets your keyword as an anchor text. So you get a high PR dofollow anchor backlink from YouTube itself. Nothing can beat this! It's safe, it's powerful and it's effective. It's effective not only for protecting your videos from NSEO, this is just the side effect. The real value of growing your channel's authority is that this is the best way to rank your videos.

For those of you who are interested in this method, check out my signature - I am offering such service - and see the results for yourself.
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Aaron Doud

10 years ago

Ian thanks again for adding clarity to this and helping me personally to understand it.

Originally Posted by BlueIndigo

Everyone's talking about backlinks... looks like all it takes to knock a competitor off the grid is to buy views for their youtube video. How crappy is that?

If negative SEO is a myth I would guess that is as well. Though it is hard to know what exactly happened. This is the only thread where I have heard of fake views hurting in such an extreme way.

Would love to hear from others on this for real world evidence of what happens. Because everything I have heard is the view number simply goes down.

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BlueIndigo

10 years ago

Doing some poking around, saw this... cued up to 4:54

How YouTube's New CEO may Change YouTube - YouTube

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Rus Sells

10 years ago

Does this photographer do wedding photo packages? The time of year you're talking about is right when brides all over this country start looking for all the things they need for their wedding.

If you included a call to action on the video and it's description asking viewers to visit the site, did you check site stats to see if the increase in views corresponded to some traffic increase to the clients site?

Just wondering about that.

Originally Posted by Ragz

Ok... I'm pissed beyond belief.
I've busted my chops and manually created about 400 edu and gov backlinks and social shares and submitted press releases to PRWeb and all that crap over the last 7 months to get a youtube video for a photographer in my area the number one organic spot in Google.
Of the last 7 months, he was in the number one spot for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th month, which was February, 2014.
He only had about 140 views going into January, but I guess all the other factors were in place. However, in about mid-January, his views jumped to 1200, then 1800, then 3500... he was elated, but I was wondering what the hell was going on?
By the end of February, he was at 8,000 views and going into March, it happened.

The video vanished.

It wasn't deleted, but it could not be found in Google or Youtube unless I'd go into his account and see that it was still there.

Welcome to my horrific introduction into the world of devilish negative SEO.

After doing a bit of research and consulting with another SEO group in my area, I found that to get a website to drop off the map is to saturate it with spammy backlinks.

I learned that it works with Youtube as well. As of the last few months, anyone that purchases views for their Youtube video has been getting bitch-slapped by youtube.

Someone obviously bought a ton of views for my client, not to help, but to get him knocked off the map. So you can bet your ass I'm watching to see who appears in the number one spot. But even then, wtf can I do about it?

So that's how Youtube and Google wanna play?
I'll be 74 next month and I guess I can finally legitimately say, I'm too old for this shit.

I'm done. What a friggin joke.

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Andrew S

10 years ago

Spamming backlinks could certainly raise your competitor considering Google would probably value some of them.

Working with domains which have been deindexed and penalized themselves, that is how you can get somewhere.

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CageyVet

10 years ago

Talking about Negative SEO on Organic listings and Talking Negative SEO within Youtube are two different beasts all together and should only be compared on the basis of the intent behind them.

As for the OP, what happened to your video sucks. The thing is, that is the nature of a sites like youtube, craigslist, Facebook, etc. There is a direct channel to the powers the control the properties that reside on those sites and as a result, the affect of negative tactics are much more harsh and quicker to produce results.

This is why diversification is the key, in both the vertical and horizontal planes. So on youtube itself, relying on one single video to accomplish a goal is not a good tactic. You need to have multiple videos and continue to create more as time goes on. This is not only to combat negative tactics but to take full advantage of the platform itself. This can be further expanded into to having backup channels in case of problems, no different backing up your PC files. This is all on the vertical plane. On the horizontal plane, it means to host your videos on multiple video sharing platforms, like vimeo, dailymotion, self hosted etc. So that if for what ever reason, youtube changes a policy that affects your videos, you still have assets on the internet to utilize.

It would be stupid for a business to put up one single billboard in the middle of tornado alley and put all hopes for marketing their business on that single entity.

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9999 10 years ago

Such a hot topic but some really great points made.
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DaniMc

10 years ago

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LastWarrior 10 years ago

Originally Posted by Dan McCoy

Damn.

That trumps my popcorn eatin' smiley I was hoping for.

Excitin' post. I'm all over it. LOL!

LastWarrior
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Matthew Anton

10 years ago

The reason it's not a HUGE deal to the SEO community is that you always have someone to take the place of a competitor. Just like it doesn't make sense to kill every man in the world to be "the strongest man in the world" it might only make sense to kill the 1,2, and 3rd strongest if you were 4th.

The fact that you have to invest time and $$ into these negative campaigns means the niche better be lucrative (can't complain in online marketing, we all have to play the game) or it's simply not worth it to push down all the competitors to push yourself up a few slots.

Game theory.

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ScottyM2 10 years ago

I thought this was appropriate for this thread...
"Where'd My Video Go?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HDMseoFXas
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How to destroy your youtube competition!

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