Comment by gscott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gscott | Hacker News Reader

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You can negative seo a site out of existence in about two hours and for about $75. It is actually super quick. Once you do it, it can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months for the site to loose it's position or be removed.

Just go to freelancer.com market. Buy several xRumer packages. Now do the same thing on Fiverr with some other various packages. Now go to Text-Link-Ads and buy some $8 dollar links and link them to your target website.

Personally, I do not do this except for a couple of years ago when Google first created negative seo. If you are trying to create backlinks to yourself it is too risky because Google will penalize you even if you are a small fry. I just make sure all of the local listings are set up (I only market small businesses that are local) and then do social marketing. Social marketing is the new backlinks. They don't last as long as backlinks and it is more effort, but that is where it pretty much is in my estimation now. To be successful in Google you can do it with about 10-30 backlinks and social marketing. Things have changed a lot since the Caffeine update.

"You can negative seo a site out of existence in about two hours and for about $75. It is actually super quick. Once you do it, it can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months for the site to loose it's position or be removed."

This doesn't scale without drawing attention to yourself.

It doesn't scale for an individual SEOer as a repeatable approach to ranking ahead of your competition. Most likely, it's mutually assured destruction - SEOers destroying each other, taking their clients with them.

It doesn't scale across the SEO industry. Too many people take this up as a tool, and the quality of Google search results suffer. That's when Google takes further action.

The one main way negative SEO back linking survives as a reusable technique is if it's used in small unnoticeable doses, and doesn't affect the typical Google user. Because when it does impact mainstream Google users, then Google takes the next step forward.

If the nightmare scenario materialises where SEOers destroy search quality results for mainstream users with negative SEO campaigns, Google flips the "spammy link penalty" off, all those sites affected bounce back immediately.

And then Google will comb through the data they've captured in that time period, and have an improved idea of what link sources are spammy. Google will have a much better idea of the network of sites you used (to benefit yourself before the penalty, and to negatively affect your competition during the penalty). It will stand out.

SEOers are in a classical prisoners dilemma.

I never said the idea was a good one, it's a bad one of course. One which I don't believe many people are doing thankfully. Myself I am not doing it because I don't want to reduce the quality of results from adding hundreds of thousands of spam listings. However, I was angry before about Google's actions on a site I was managing and acted out. I am calm and rational now.

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