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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

No, go read the comments. The first change was made 10 years ago; the change you're referring to apparently happened sometime between March and April 2012[1].

Moreover, there's absolutely no information about how you could penalize someone's site. The article's speculation is exactly that.

Honestly, if it were as easy as buying a bunch of spam links to a site for $20 and get them penalized or delisted, there would have already been a host of exposés showing exactly that. There are a lot of motivated SEOs out there, chomping at the bit to show that their personal Google conspiracy theory is correct.

[1] http://www.seroundtable.com/google-can-competitors-harm-me-1...

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Somebody posted a link to a detailed expose' on HN a few weeks ago detailing a successful negative SEO campaign to destroy a competing car dealer's rankings. I'll see if I can dig it up, but this kind of stuff is definitely going on - and people are specifically being paid to do it.

I think it was http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-... (Comment by trevin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701104)

Since I've got some free time between meetings, I'll go ahead and debunk this one. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-... is a claim from April 18, 2012 that claimed that negative SEO worked on justgoodcars.com.

Here's the problem with that: the site they selected was spamming, and Google had already taken action on that site. The site had been spamming for years; see e.g. http://growabrain.typepad.com/growabrain/2007/10/fiat-126.ht... for a spam comment pointing to justgoodcars.com from January of 2008. Here's another spam link from April 2008: http://www.punny.org/money/ditch-your-ancient-car-and-get-30... . Or check out this low-quality directory link from years ago: http://www.easyweblistonline.com/News___Media/Automotive/ Or this low-quality directory: http://www.whatclicks.com/shopping/automotive.html

Google found a bunch of spammy links like this dating back years and years, and we took manual webspam action regarding this site before this so-called "detailed expose" of negative SEO ever came out.

Like many of the reports of "successful negative SEO" that we've investigated, the claims didn't hold up. In this case, we had already caught the site in question for spammy links going back years and years--long before the negative SEO campaign started.

Interesting back story to that one. Thanks for sharing those details.

Yes, that's it. Thanks.

Oops, I was believing what the article said. You're right, the comments are worth reading in this case.

That said, I have not experimented either way. But I've known enough people who accidentally hurt their own ratings that I don't see why it wouldn't be easy to hurt someone else's.

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