My god, the quote from that "white hat" SEO guy just defies belief:
> There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth
To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming, when they then refuse to help an abusive site clean up its own mess for free .. I have no words. Could anyone possibly be more of a self-interested, myopic, egocentric prick?
My rock-bottom opinion of pretty much anyone who has anything to do with active SEO is re-confirmed for the thousandth time.
"To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming"
I suspect this comment was aimed at webmasters not who were the victims of spam, but those that profited from it. It's those who run directory sites and article farms that would accept cash to add your link, and now that people want the links removed, they're double dipping. And these people are indeed scummy.
If they paid to get listed there in the first place (paid link for the purpose of better rankings), then it's fair game to pay to remove the ranking disadvantage now. I call it an ethics tax.
Paid links were frowned on but not generally penalised. So sites took the risk they wouldn't get caught or penalised. Now they got penalised. So if it was okay to pay for a linkback, equally it should be okay to pay for the removal of a linkback.
Perhaps. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on if it's moral to charge for something like that. But the Disavow Link Tool exists for a reason, and webmasters can use it to manually remove those bad links. Though they are encouraged to make an honest effort to contact webmasters first.
Note how Google wants to see evidence in the Link Disavow file that sites have TRIED to remove links manually:
Here's a sample of a valid file:
#example.com removed most links, but missed these
http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html
http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html
# Contacted owner of shadyseo.com on 7/1/2012 to
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:shadyseo.com
So this whole post seems like sort of a hissy fit from the edge case of a site that a) failed to protect itself by linking out with followed links from untrusted posters and then got spammed to hell, and then b) gets offended when he reads a comment directed at sites who are trying to profit by removing links when all he really needs to do is hit delete when he gets emailed with link removal requests.
I agree with the comment that this is fair play or an "ethics tax" on people who bought links... f-em I say, since they cheated to begin with and hurt sites who played by the rules and whose content should have enjoyed better rankings and traffic than it did due to the spammers. So whatever hell they're in now is fine by me.
But I also think the OP brought his problems on himself. I ran a huge UGC site for 10 years before I sold it and sorry to say, but if you want to play forum master, you're responsible for defending your site from whatever nastiness is out there. We expect UGC sites to have porn filters, profanity filters, troll filters, and a DMCA takedown procedure, do I don't think it's too much to think that smart webmasters will nofollow links (which is why this site got on the XRumer radar in the first place).
I can understand someone getting frustrated. This forum may have great information, but it is also causing a lot of harm, possibly leading people to dangerous sites. Is it the owners responsibility to do something about that? I think so.
Just as you have lots of machines that have been compromised and are part of a botnet.
> Is it the owners responsibility to do something about that?
Reasonably, yes. But, when the volume of spam becomes too much to handle, what can a poor webmaster do?
I quite like that Google have altered their algorithm to penalise this SEO behaviour. Because it now puts the headache firmly on the website that paid SEO people to originally spam those links.
And I applaud and support the webmaster who requested payment for removing the link. The link was placed by a link spammer on behalf of their client, it's only right that that client, after benefitting from that tactic - risk free - now should pay for it to be removed.
Granted, there are negative SEO connotations to this, but factors like link-age can be used to spot who was link spamming before Penguin/Panda, and who is link spamming after.
I would be thoroughly impressed with an SEO agency who was practicing this now negative SEO tactic before links from spammy neighbourhoods were risk free. And thus benefitting by giving their competition a headache post Penguin and Panda.
I have no sympathy for companies that hired SEO agencies who link-spammed their website. They shouldn't have done it (ethic-deprived), and if they didn't know about it they should have known about it (abrogation of responsibility). If there was deceit involved, then the company can take it up with the SEO agency that created that deceit.
Yes, clean SEOers are doing a roaring trade trying to clean up these websites, but they must realise their client caused the initial damage by hiring bad SEOers, and they are not entitled to free link removals.
So what if the site requesting the link take downs was a victim of someone else spamming links out pointing at their site? It's not a white/black situation, there are many ways those links could come about and there are legitimate SEOs out there requesting they be taken down.
This is what I was thinking. Not every site that has had its url spammed across forums and in comment-spam did it themselves. The other side of black hat SEO is destroying competitors by triggering Google penalties against them.
I used to run a forum but I shut it down because of spam. It was a shame. It was well ranked on Google and I think this is why spam was such a problem. It was a nice before it was overwhelmed. I did moderator approved sign up but I was getting several hundred sign ups a day. It wasn't possible to determine who was human and who wasn't.
Captchas and security questions decreased spam for a couple of days but it would soon come up again.
I added 10 posts before you can post a link.. but then the forum was filled with non-link spam posts. Stuff like "I agree." "I appreciate your post, it was very helpful."
I added moderator approved first posts but it meant there was a queue of a 250+ posts a day. People stuck in this queue, especially on weekends would often give up on the site.
In the end people started losing interest as moderators were struggling with the battle against spam..
During this time I actually got a few requests for links to be taken down. I refused them all. It wasn't out of anger. It simply wasn't worth my time. I would need to look at each url requested. Determine if it was spam or if it added value to the site. Then choose whether to delete it or not. Each request would take 5-10 minutes to process. Perhaps I should have started charging. I could then have given beer money to the brave moderators who for 18 months tirelessly swept for the forum.
I see nothing wrong with sites charging say $5-10 to permanently remove a link from a website and make it impossible for it to be posted again.
"Not every site that has had its url spammed across forums and in comment-spam did it themselves. The other side of black hat SEO is destroying competitors by triggering Google penalties against them."
That tactic (of spammy linking to your competitors) only became a viable one after Panda/Penguin. I doubt it was practiced by SEO agencies before those algorithm changes. So links added before that change are unlikely to be negative SEO.
"Google doesn't need your optimisation "help". Just create compelling content."
Sadly, that's still not entirely the case.
It's more true than it used to be that content can carry a site on its own. But I still see dozens of quality websites and writers getting far less readers than they should, purely because they don't understand the basics of formatting pages for search engines.
A little bit of optimisation FOR search engines on your own pages can do wonders for your traffic, readers and viability as a business.
I don't know if some SEO actually do that, but following Google's guidelines for webmasters, using Google's webmaster tools instead of building an opaque site with Flash or full Javascript certainly helps Google (otherwise they wouldn't publish these guidelines to start with).
Short of subverting human nature of everyone on the Internet it will never be possible to have a leading search engine that people aren't constantly trying to game.
The best we can hope for is gaming behaviors to roughly align with desirable search results.
I don't see an ethical disconnect. Google is the world's largest scraper, making almost all of their revenue by serving ads next to the content of everyone else but them, yet there is an "ethical disconnect" by voluntarily choosing to still abide by their guidelines?
> Google is the world's largest scraper, making almost all of their
> revenue by serving ads next to the content of everyone else but them,
That's oversimplifying the service and value Google offers. This is the typical passive-aggressive SEO stance. Deriding Google for the service it offers, but at the same time craving it's attention. Because you know, Google gives you a steady stream of customers.
People use Google because it helps get them to the websites that offer the content that people are looking for. It's (relatively) good at matching seekers with the information they seek. That's what brings people back to Google over and over.
And so, the page they deliver has value to people.
Yes, they scrape content from everyone else. Including themselves (e.g. a search for "Google webmaster guidelines" returns support.google.com).
They also add to that their special ingredients - algorithms that dissect pages, classifying, inferring meaning, deriving synonyms, inferring intent. Weighing, scoring, evaluating every page out there. So when a customer comes a-querying, it uses those calculated metrics to decide which 10 pages get to be mentioned on a search results page, and what snippet/extract of those 10 pages to show.
The value Google adds is the selection of which pages to link to based on the query and what it knows/infers about the pages themselves. That is no trivial thing.
It's nowhere near passive aggressive, just a statement of what Google does. Google does give a steady stream of traffic, but it's my goal to diversify traffic streams as much as possible at the same time - Google's becoming less important as a direct source of traffic from organic SERPs.
I'm not saying they don't add value, I'm saying that their entire business model is built on the back of the world's content.
I'm not sure why HN hates SEO so much, since Google doesn't...they hate SPAM, not SEO.
> There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth
To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming, when they then refuse to help an abusive site clean up its own mess for free .. I have no words. Could anyone possibly be more of a self-interested, myopic, egocentric prick?
My rock-bottom opinion of pretty much anyone who has anything to do with active SEO is re-confirmed for the thousandth time.