Hacker News Reader

>Google's algorithm is smart enough to recognise Neg SEO attacks. Sure five years ago you could buy a blast of spammy links using Xrumer or GSA with some viagra anchor text and boom you're competition is gone.

I distinctly remember 8 years ago dealing with negative SEO and reading the same thing everywhere while researching it. "Negative SEO used to work in the olden days of the internet, but now in the modern era Google is all over it."

I wonder if in 5 years people will be admitting that negative SEO worked 5 years ago.

I had a ten year old site virtually de-indexed as a result of someone plagiarising one single page. It wasn't even an attack as such, just someone being too lazy to at least re-word the article.

This was within the last 3 years. Until then, I too believed Google were 'smart enough' to recognise such things.

> From a quick glance, most of your pages have pretty thin content, and I assume it's pulling from an API, so none of it is unique. If there was one thing I would do is try to build some content on pages.

Your advice will help OP, but it's sad to see it on here.

Adding content to sites that don't need it ruins the experience. Don't build for the bot, build for humans.

SEO is a cancer on the web. A few days ago Google directed me to a recipe for a particular type of bread. I swear I had to scroll through the authors entire life story... how their grandmother handed down this recipe from her grandmothers mother, how it feels to make you own bread, how to save your sanity with bread, how best to store bread.

The recipe at the very bottom of the page could have fit neatly above the fold.

Here are two options for OP, either of which will improve his website, unlike your suggestion: https://i.imgur.com/9VlBguW.png

This 100% with looking for recipes. I understand that they need a lot of "rich content" in order to improve SEO rankings, but when it takes a good 20 seconds to scroll on a phone, past 3 inline ads just to get to the recipe, it's beyond frustrating.

Here's a recipe search site I built not too long ago that shows you just the recipe: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/

My understanding with recipe sites is the copy isn't really for SEO as much as it is to have something you can copyright, because recipes in isolation can't be.

But anyone can still legally copy the recipe (the ingredients and how to combine them) and ignore the superfluous content.

Hey there and thanks for looking into it.

I'm aware of the algo update that happened in December (and that it correlated very closely with my drop in rankings).

However, in my experience - even though jumps or drops in ranking are almost always triggered by such updates - there is a good reason for it to happen.

But you're right, what is happening here may've also had no effect whatsoever.

In any case - I found it because I dug up to try and what was going on and I can't explain what I found in any other way.

Even if it didn't affect ranking - does it look like negative SEO to you or do you think something else is going on here?

This December update was quite significant, as I know a few peoples sites tanked as well, so you're not alone.

I still think the main problem for you is thin content. Google doesn't seem to be as strict as they are about duplicate content. But if you're taking the movie/episode description from TMDb, there are most likely thousands of other sites doing it too.

Google could have put you in a category of thin content [1], you may have got a notification in Search Console (but unlikely, I'm not a fan of the new Search Console since literally all the data in there is so vague which makes it not very helpful).

Another thing is that when I look in Ahrefs for pages with the most links [2], they are forum profiles that have been hit with spammy Xrumer/GSA link. They're referred to as profile links. They are pretty useless, but people still build them as there is literally $0 cost to do so.

If I were to offer my advice, my first step would be to build some content. First, add some content on the homepage (if you get SurferSEO it will tell how many words to write based on your competition) and then if you're willing to build a blog in (you seem to be a developer). You could write some roundup articles that are SEO focused and then link to the relevant Show/Movie, which would also help your internal linking.

If you wanted to explore building backlinks (depending on if you want to go on a whitehat or greyhat road) - you can look into paid guest posts or niche edits.

[1] https://www.vertical-leap.uk/blog/what-is-thin-content-why-d... [2] https://i.imgur.com/xZ8VEJQ.png

I'll check out what SurferSEO is suggesting, thanks for the recommendation, though generally - I try to avoid tailoring my content for bots and optimal SEO.

Good catch with the spammy forum profiles - I moderate the forum quite heavily, so there is no spam there, but I never thought to monitor inactive profiles. I'll clean them up and will see what I can do to try and prevent those from popping up in future.

Thanks

Like the poster above -- I don't think it's negative SEO either.

I think it's just an opportunistic person who saw an easy way to rank their own stuff by taking advantage of your hard work

Like you said -- they ranked higher in some cases (without doing any work besides copying you).

But what are they ranking higher?

Only the domains that display the stolen content, with no ads or anything.

What is in it for them?

It doesn't make much sense to do it other than if you're trying to affect someone else's ranking by causing them to be penalized for duplicate content. No?

if you look through their source code there are ad tags.

view-source:https://[redacted].com/titansgrave--the-ashes-of-valkana/sea...

unless you have a competitor you really hates you for some personal vendetta, it's exceptionally rare to see this level of effort for the purpose of negative SEO in 2021.

like I said just looks like a spammer going for low hanging fruit, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks

Not sure what you mean.

The AD code there is mine and the only thing they added is some JavaScript code for a Russian web page counter ...

Can you please remove the link to the offending site as not to give them any link juice?

I think the OP is saying it's a spammer running experiments to see what works, with the intention of maybe one day doing something.

I'm not sure that is a correct assessment, just (hopefully) clarifying the OP's intent.

it looks like my post is too old at his point to allow me to edit it. If DanG or any mods are around, I would appreciate if you could remove the link on my previous post.

Yup. Edited now.

"Google's algorithm is smart enough to recognise Neg SEO attacks"

This is mysterious to me. That bad links hurt your site unless someone else bought them. Google's smart and all, but?

John Mueller even said himself: https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/913222203071594496

This is not an isolated thing, negative SEO attacks happen on a daily basis, mostly intention but I bet you there are some accidental ones too.

If neg SEO still worked efficiently, then SEO's would be focusing on spamming their competition instead of investing in quality content and backlinks.

Like any case, disavow the links if you need, then move on and continue to build content Google likes with quality backlinks.

Until recently, Google had a form you could report scraped pages that outranked your original content.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6...

The fact they removed it tells me they're confident enough in their algorithms nowdays, but that doesn't mean they're perfect.

I can see my own content being outranked by the scraping domains in this very case.

Just google "Streaming Services Availability added to Episodes and Movies" and you'll see.

If they can outrank me, I don't see how this will not affect me negatively by my content being considered duplicate ...

> The fact they removed it tells me they're confident enough in their algorithms nowdays

Ot it could mean something completely different.

This is it, and the Jan update and then the end of Jan update too. All of which has wiped a lot of traffic for others out there all with solid sites.

Right now getting links indexed is a 15 day+ affair for some, some have no luck at all. From search results that I have been getting, it's almost like nothing makes sense anymore. Pure garbage content is at the top, or worst of all content from 3+ years ago and content freshness is considered a key ranking factor.

Btw, forgot to comment on your remark about the forum.

The thing is, I have "nofollow"-ed all links to the forum from the main site. Honestly, at this point - I don't even remember why I did it, it must've been close to 10 years ago.

Now this makes me think if I should remove those nofollows ...

It's fine to leave them. The people who create these forum profile links will be doing it manually. Whether they're nofollow or dofollow, people will still try to build these links.

Nofollow is another thing that isn't important as used to be. Sure dofollow does give you more link juice, but nofollows are still good. If you have 99% dofollow links to your site it's going to look unnatural, so a good mix of dofollow and nofollow always heps.