Is this already happening?
The thing is that google's algorithm looks like this (http://imgur.com/XxhZg) and the real "SEO experts", the black hat guys, run circles around it. If you doubt that just look at the results of your search queries. See any spam?
I've built a blog in 2005 which I basically abandoned in 2007. That blog was scraped and its content republished by a few BH guys who didn't bothered to remove links pointing to my original blog which resulted that today my blog has over 75% of its links coming from the splog farms. I'm not talking about a few links here and there. I have over 40000 of those and yet I have no warnings in GWMT and the blog ranks #1 for its main keyword.
If you're running an online business avoid hiring "SEO experts", they are not just useless they are dangerous.
So, how can you get hurt by some asshole?
First, he can buy links on the splog farms already penalized by google. Second, he can create extremely transparent splog farm and link to your site. (by transparent I mean autogen content, no keyword variations in anchor text, trackback spam, ...) Third, he can just "xrumer blast" you out of google index.
I believe that the approach google took recently will get a lot of small business (and webmasters) hurt, but it will have almost no effect on black hatters. Why? Because, with all being said and done, the only thing that really counts in SEO is the number of links and the BH guys are masters at creating those. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb)
Google screwed it up big time by making negative SEO possible, but I doubt they'll change their approach. I doubt that they even care about it.
Not in my queries, no.
This is so condescending it's amazing. You're calling me an idiot, you know that, right?
No matter how well designed or "active" websites may appear, if its only function is to send you to some affiliate offer - it's spam. The best of them are very good at faking legit websites (even having an active "community" engaged in "discussion"). They are extremely good at faking normal human activity and I don't see the end to it. There's virtually nothing you can do that a script can't do also.
I don't think this definition is quite right.
A site can be good and still have as its raison d'etre referring you to a product manufacturer. After all any sales website is doing the same thing, there's just a certain distance between affiliate sites and the manufacturer.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of affiliate sites are bogus, unhelpful and given unwarranted prevalence in SERPs; but that doesn't make them all bad. For example in the UK there are sites that offer money back on all purchases - they're affiliate sites that share the affiliate fee with the purchaser.
Google believes that pure affiliate websites do not provide additional value for web users, especially if they are part of a program that distributes its content to several hundred affiliates. Because a search result could return multiple sites, all with the same content, they create a frustrating user experience.
And here's the rest of it: http://bit.ly/KWS1cz
>For example in the UK there are sites that offer money back on all purchases
I don't see the relevance.
The only purpose of those sites is to get you to follow affiliate links.
Were you trying to refer to some sort of passthrough short-linking system or something?
They have so many links from various sources that any effort at generating enough "bad links" would be virtually unnoticeable. Other than that, they don't care about their rankings. I mean, would you go to google.com (or bing.com) to find a search engine by typing "search engine"?
You can have a few laughs by doing a google bomb, but that's it. You can't hurt google with negative SEO.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-...
In the seomoz article find "It's even more terrifying, but they sent fake emails" to get to the relevant part.
I would bet this is some kind of business tort -- unfair competition, interference with potential business relationships, commercial disparagement, something along those lines. I don't have any particular knowledge in this area, but intuitively, it's too shady to be legal -- it's like taking out embarrassing ads in your competitor's name or something. Not a normal part of business competition. (A good rule of thumb -- if it were legal, would people be doing it?) Maybe you could even get to trademark infringement, if you argued that the bogus links are a false claim that the company itself is doing something it isn't doing -- like if I distributed swastikas with my competitor's logo and phone number on them, I can imagine that being some kind of trademark tort.
That doesn't mean you can prove it. It would be interesting trying to dig up the evidence, especially if the blackhat intermediaries are in an awkward jurisdiction, and then prove how much impact it had on your business. But I bet it could be done. (Like others, I'm skeptical that that's really what happened in this particular case. But who knows ...)
As a reminder, I am not your lawyer or your mother. Take those elbows off the table, young man.
smaller players (in the poker vertical) tried to kick out bigger players this way. we saw it, we were worried, then google took care of the "poker" vertical overall (the big "poker" shake up of 2009).
i would personally just report it to google. if i would not get a response via the "reconsideration request" i would fly to one of the SEO conferences and talk with one of the google spam guys there. would be a much better option than sending idiotic threatening letters to random websites.