Hello, this is an extortion email
dejanseo.com.au
dejanseo.com.au
This mass funelling of inlinks, also called a Sybil attack are not that hard to defend against if one tweaks the Pagerank equations just a little bit. The source of the problem in the original Pagerank equation was that it used addition. The Pagerank of a page was defined to be the sum of all inlink weights flowing in. Now sum is a problem because it cannot distinguish between links from a million shitty pages, from a link from a golden page if the total link weight flowing in is the same. I seriously doubt if sum is used anymore.
The solution is fairly straightforward, dont use a sum, use a function that weighs higher values higher. An extreme example would be the MAX operator. In this case, among all the inlinks my site receives, only the one with the maximum inflow counts, all the crappy inlinks might as well have not existed. Max is brittle though and causes instabilities in the convergence, but variations of soft max works decently enough in theory. To phrase it in another way, the original Pagerank equations used the L1 norm of the in-flow vector, one can use Lp norm [0] or fractional powers Lp norms with a higher p . If one chooses p = \infinity one gets the MAX operator.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp_space#The_p-norm_in_finite_d...
They did get it wrong, and the problem has been well known for many months. Google has placed a weapon in the hands of anyone who wants to spend a modest amount of money to buy thousands of spammy links pointing to your site. But Google doesn't consider this a real problem, because you can spend hundreds of hours tracking these links down and disavowing them.
Google used to change the value of "bad" links to 0 rather than negative. The problem was that there was no risk to spamming. You might waste time, but you might get some links that Google didn't realize were spam.
There are a lot of problems with what srean suggested above, namely that it favors big brands who work with other big brands and creates additional barriers to entry for new companies.
I think Google has gone too far in link-based penalties, but the solution isn't to stop them altogether. Their current solution for weighing anchor text and trust is pretty weak. I've never seen a confirmed case of "negative SEO" working to penalize, but I have seen Google penalizing people for things that were not meant to manipulate the algorithm.
There's not an easy solution, but I think it's a far more sophisticated spam-fighting algorithm.
The problem is that spammers / extortionists can adapt their techniques much more so than Google can.
They care solely about getting paid, they don't care about building a brand, offering a good service or anything else. This allows them a huge degree of flexibility when finding ways to attack their less nimble adversary. They can transition from selling viagra to extortion with ease.
If it was straightforward, a company which employs many of the most gifted, technical minds in the world should probably have figured it out by now. Also, it's very unlikely that Pagerank is even in use at all at this point.
And stopping spammers is good - fighting web spam is (was) a major effort for e.g. forum operators.
I run a forum hosting platform (forumcrea.com) and we get spammed a lot. Empty forum creation with just links, profile bombing or just mass posting are hard to deal with. We have advanced captcha, clever javascript tricks, manual cleaning, ip banning... However, when you are dealing with human farms or just a smart spammer, it's almost impossible to keep up. Plus it's only a side thing that I run for free entirely, so I don't want to waste time dealing with it. Some people do use the forums for good though.
Concerning this particular problem, my experience is in 98% of the case, they are not going to carry on with their threats. Almost every emails asking for link removals (and that's a lot!) I've received from site owners is when they have hired a SEO company (or run the bots themselves) that has spammed the forums of my platform.
Something piss me off about these people. It's when they then ask YOU to remove their mess. Without any compensation. I usually not respond (I am carrying on cleaning tasks whenever I want and if I want.) or respond with $150 bill. They should have keep the login/password or keep access to the forgotten password email. I don't know why I will do special treatments.
Funny story. I think the only time I've received a link removal requests explaining their were poor victims of negative SEO, it was from the same people that 2 weeks in the past sent me a email explaining their are the ones who have spammed the forums. They think we are stupid or something. I guess they haven't liked the idea of paying for spam cleaning. Shady once, shady forever.
This is why I setup http://blogspam.net/ - An API service that you can use to test submissions in real-time. I wanted to abstract the testing from one of my sites that attracted a lot of this stuff.
Might be worth a look for you.
Those sites are as much a problem as the spammers themselves. They are analogous to open relays in e-mail.
The closest form I could find to report this to Google is: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks Though not regular selling links for money, I would make note about that in the additional details and provide a link to their XRumer domain list.
In my experience the folks over at the webmaster forums: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters are good at, and interested in, handling these sorts of cases.
Now, in this case the spammer has supplied you with a list.
That makes life a lot easier, as you have a source of 20,000 links to disallow!
Unfortunately in remote places and smaller towns, it'd cost you <$50 to completely decimate any online competition in your area via Google. It'd cost them >$300 to fix these with a paid "SEO expert".
So with a paid product that was now useless (or less useful) for linkspam, they now turn it around and use it for blackmail: Pay us or we point all these links to your site.
There used to be a time when the majority of these links were simply ignored by Google. They were worthless for both linkbuilding and negative SEO. This may or may not have changed with more recent updates.
In all of this spammers are largely sailing blindly and most of their analytic "insights" are circumstantial. Pointing a large amount of XRumer links to a site may only be a single signal to start a deeper investigation: if that turns up nothing spammy, chalk it up to ineffective negative SEO, and investigate deeper.
I assume Google is aware of this issue and has a system in place to try and prevent it, but good luck getting support if it screws up and your site falls through the cracks.
So now Google can tell the difference between a "legitimate" ("white-hat") site and a "spammy" ("black-hat") site. The legitimate site uses the link disavow tool when it gets bad links. The spammy site does not.
This gives Google a much better filter for "spammy" sites. The cost is that some webmasters might be victimized without realizing it, and not use the disavow tool. But it severely reduces any incentive blackhats have to spam links to their own properties.
You just launched a joe-job attack on someone who is accused (without conclusive proof) of launching joe-job attacks.
Also, should this ever happen, point them to a random 419 scammer. that'll keep 'em busy for a while
Further, say you're google - how do you tell that these spammy links are from an external extortion threat to a company and not an attempt at black hat, spammy SEO?
It's realistically a minimum of a couple months for Google to remove disavowed links - if ever.
It's always been an issue that someone can purchase links on spam websites and harm competitors, I would imagine that Google knows about this.
I don't see any advantage to harming a websites rankings because of these questionable SEO techniques.
It is a cat and mouse game and we are going to get fucked.
Google just keeps creeping deeper into the shade ...