Overcoming 4 black hat SEO techniques that spammers and scammers use to harm your search rankings

The dark side of SEO can be crippling to a business if they aren’t aware of how to fight back. Here are four negative (or black hat) SEO tactics to keep a keen eye out for, and how you can protect your site – and your business – from being a victim.

Someone Outranking You With Your Own Content? Use The New Google Scraper Report

One of the most frustrating experiences for any publisher is discovering that someone not only has copied your content but outranks you on Google for searches related to that content. Now, Google seems to have heard the complaints and has launched a to…

Matt Cutts At Pubcon 2013: Moonshots, Machine Learning & The Future Of Google Search

This morning Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, gave a keynote speech at Pubcon in Las Vegas. The keynote comes on the heels of a scathing day 1 keynote from Jason Calacanis who said that Google rules everything, that they were essentially evil. On Twitter yesterday Matt asked if…

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The Structured Data Brouhaha At SMX East: Clarifying Contentious Issues

If you attended the Structured Data Superstars session at SMX East earlier this month, you probably witnessed a very brief interchange between myself and Googler Pierre Far at the end of the session. Pierre woke everyone up by stating that some of the semantic markup recommendations I’d…

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Google May Have Penalized Another Major Link Network: Ghost Rank 2.0

Google has significantly penalized another underground link network over the weekend and we believe that one of the link networks targeted by Google is named Ghost Rank 2.0. A few weeks ago, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, tweeted “Thinking of ghost-related puns for a spam…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: Spammers Rarely Spam Using Multiple ccTLDs

In a recent video answer by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, Google said that spammers rarely use multiple or mass number of ccTLDs in an effort to spam. This comment came from Matt Cutts when he answered a question on if it is duplicate content to have the same content on an IPv4…

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Google Says “Snag” Has Taken Manual Spam Actions Viewer Offline

If you’re not seeing the “Manual Actions” feature in Google Webmaster Tools, you’re not alone. Many webmasters have taken to Twitter and other social networks to say that the link has been removed from their accounts, and Google has updated its original announcement to say…

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Google Launches Manual Spam Actions Viewer, Streamlines Reconsideration Process

Google is adding a new feature in Webmaster Tools that will leave no doubt when a site’s search rankings are affected by a manual webspam action. It’s called the Manual Actions viewer, and it’s available today under the “Search Traffic” tab. The new tool complements…

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Google’s Matt Cutts: We Fight Search Spam In 40+ Countries & Internationalize Our Spam Algorithms

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced in a video that Google fights search spam at an international level but does tend to have a stronger spam fighting sense in the Google.com, English search results. Matt Cutts explained that with most of Google’s spam fighting…

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Google To Take Action Against Fake Search Results Injected Into Browser History

Google made a clear stance late Friday on the Google Webmaster blog that they will not tolerate webmasters pushing deceptive search results to searchers through the use of browser history spamming techniques. The technique uses a method of detecting a click on the browser’s back button. When…

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Google Pay Day Loan Algorithm: Google Search Algorithm Update To Target Spammy Queries

Google has officially launched a new search update to target “spammy queries” such as pay day loan, pornographic and other heavily spammed queries. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, announced this on Twitter saying “We just started a new ranking update today for some…

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Penguin 2.0 Losers: Porn Sites, Game Sites, & Big Brands Like Dish.com & The Salvation Army

Google’s fourth Penguin update — what the company is calling Penguin 2.0 — hit last night, and less than 24 hours later we’re already getting a first chance to look at what sites might be considered “losers” in terms of search visibility. In a nutshell, the list…

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Google Notifies Sprint Of Spam Penalty; Seeks Advice In Google Help Forums

The latest large brand to be hit with a user generated content spam penalty notification is Sprint, the large U.S. wireless communications company. Similar to Mozilla’s penalty and BBC’s penalty, Sprint was penalized for user-generated content spam on a portion of their site that was…

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Forum Spam – A Practical Guide

If you’ve landed on this page hoping to find tips on enhancing your forum spam strategy, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. This guide is intended for those poor souls tasked with cleaning up the aftermath of a merciless spam campaign that has plastered your lovely domain across countless hell-holes of the internet with all […]

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Google Hits Mozilla With Spam Penalty Over User Generated Content

Have user generated content on your site? Pay attention to what those users are doing. That’s the takeaway from Google hitting Mozilla with a spam penalty this week, along with another takeaway. Despite Google’s saying it’s being more transparent about spam actions, people clearly…

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