SEO News

But before I start, I want to overtly caveat this blog post to state 7thingsmedia does not condone the use of negative SEO.  This is purely a topical point to discuss within the industry – whether taboo or not!

Until recently, negative SEO stayed out of the spotlight, lurking on the darker, more subversive areas of the net, like BlackHatWorld.com. With significant visibility drops for USwitch, Halifax, William Hill and Dialaphone and after Expedia’s recent penalty and subsequent share price decline, the topic is the subject of heated discussion in the SEO world. 

Uswitch, Halifax, William Hill & Dialaphone all had pretty big hits in organic visibility this week.

— Dan Sharp (@screamingfrog) February 7, 2014

Funnily enough, in Expedia’s case, there was no real suggestion that any negative SEO was at work. It was more a case of Expedia using aggressive and out-dated techniques to scale its link profile in a fairly autonomous manner (by injecting an anchor text rich backlink to Expedia into Travel Blog templates – amongst other techniques).

Regardless, this has still posed some pertinent questions in the industry regarding potential growth of this quintessentially blackhat tactic.  

So what is negative SEO in 2014? 

Common negative SEO practices currently all revolve around one of the main factors in determining a site/pages ranking ability, namely external links. This is because external links are the one area of an SEO campaign that cannot be controlled explicitly by the brand/agency; therefore manipulation by third parties is always a risk. 

So imagine Competitor A notices that Competitor B has moved above them in the SERPS for a crucial high volume term. Competitor A has some projects in the pipeline targeting the keywords, but is dealing with a manual link penalty. Competitor A decides if Competitor B too had an albatross round its neck it would give them a better chance in the war of attrition.

Ten minutes on Fiverr later, a link wheel is established sending thousands of anchor text optimised links to Competitor A’s site, targeting the domain or the desired page that outranks Competitor B. These links are low-quality, they come from new/de-indexed and irrelevant domains, with a total lack of valued content.

Now in many instances of negative SEO, the damage can be short-lived, as webmasters can review their links, performing iterations of link removal and disavowing, in the hope that a manual penalty won’t be received.

However when a link wheel is used, Competitor A will find itself playing a constant game of ‘link whack a mole’, where its outreach departments are constantly contacting webmasters for new poor quality links that surface each day.

This can not only detract from the campaigns that have been planned by the brand or search agency, but it can inflict some fairly serious overheads either from tool subscriptions for automated discoveries/analysis or man hours taken in reviewing the links one by one. 

These impacts are nothing in comparison with the downturn that would be experienced with an algorithmic/manual penalty, so you can understand why so many companies are reviewing their historic links at this stage. Many companies previously selling links have adopted a new stance, monetising the removal of the previously placed links and in many instances, offering negative SEO as a managed service. 

Comparisons

Let’s put this into a more real-world perspective, so imagine you’re the marketing director for Ugg Boots. A competitor goads a reporter into writing a story about how Ugg uses kitten fur to line its famous boots. The story gets shared a few times via social media and a couple of content aggregators pick up the piece.

The story might not reach many people, as its only shown in the local area, however a year later, when Trading Standards have received complaints from Ugg customers regarding the provenance of their materials, the article is dug up and revisited by the authorities. Now I’m not suggesting Trading Standards would believe a poorly marketed story with purely circumstantial evidence, however, it might affect its decision to investigate the brand and this is where many companies, plagued by legacy SEO issues caused by previous campaigns, would fall foul.

Ugg would be forced to allocate resources to challenging Trading Standards, effectively clearing its name. 

Now in this highly litigated environment, a story like this wouldn’t even go to print, as a slander case would be quick on the heels of any reporter making accusations like these. But even in today’s world, where jail sentences are handed out for ‘anti-social’ (I despise that term!) behaviour on social networks, the same ‘real-world’ repercussions are not in place to deter contributors from communicating their slanderous accusations. 

Let’s for a second imagine that the Expedia case study we’ve seen flung into prominence recently was a bonafide case of negative SEO. Reports showed the share price of Expedia falling by 4% shortly after the news hit that 25% of visibility had been nuked by the Google penalty. The share price downturn was clearly mediated well, as with 25% loss of visibility, one might expect more shareholders to jump ship.

Across digital, we often see a strong dependence on natural search traffic which makes these kind of punitive actions from Google even more impactful. These penalties can bring small and big brands alike to their knees, as was observed with the Interflora penalisation which took hold some few days before the second biggest peak for the flower retailer. 

Expedia Visibility drop – Geekwire

Interflora drop – Martin MacDonald

The cost of performing negative SEO hasn’t really changed in years, if anything, it has become more widely available and at more competitive costs. This may be one of the reasons why we’re seeing more instances of this kind of digital warfare, especially with smaller brands in competitive niches. 

How are Search Engines combatting this?

Well the honest answer is, they aren’t. With no way of identifying the origin of negative links, search engines like Google and Bing are unable to police effectively against these damaging SEO assaults. Instead search engines are left to fire-fight these cases on an individual basis, often relying on tip-offs from other competitors, which are of course again open to manipulation.

Without established detection triggers and methods, what can search engines do right now to detect negative SEO? Yandex has already reduced the importance of links in its ranking factors, some three months ago. This may be a potential solution, but what factors will replace links if this is the tact taken? Social?

We’ve already seen the extent to which social can be gamed, so potentially scrapping links is out of the question. A more reasonable, and likely solution would be to allow a certain proportion of malpractice links, or to detect unusually quick changes to the ratio of anchor text across a brands backlink profile.

These would not be iron-clad fixes in any way, but they would level the playing field in an environment where verticals are so saturated that every brand is looking for an edge over their competitors. At this stage, the responsibility for policing negative SEO is left firmly in the hands of us marketers.

If we can protect our brands, or better yet, prevent our brands from being targeted in the first place, by being outwardly altruistic and vocal in their verticals, then this should form part of all exhaustive SEO strategies. 

How Can I Detect Negative SEO?

I will always be a staunch supporter of manual reviews, however there are one or two useful utilities out there to help you identify potentially damaging links.

If you’re short of time they are certainly worth considering, but remember that you will usually have to sense check many of the links manually, as often these tools will highlight sites with poor trust flows but they won’t highlight websites that are reputable, but unfortunately totally irrelevant. 

Tools

• LinkRisk 
• DTOX from LinkResearchTools

Once you’ve got your tools/excel sheet setup, you’ll need to gather links from multiple sources to ensure you have the full link profile picture. 

• Google Webmaster Tools: download your links from GWT by selecting ‘Search Traffic’, ‘Links to Your Site’ and then by selecting ‘Download the latest links’. You can also download all the domains here, but please note that on any given day the sampled data you are given can vary, so to get a full picture, download your links across numerous days and compile to remove any duplicates. 

• MajesticSEO: go to the horses mouth – Majestic provides an awesome amount of data to many other third party providers in the SEO industry and because it’s been scraping this data for so long it has the most comprehensive index of links but significantly, a timeline for when those links were first discovered. This can be fantastic if you’re not cleaning up negative SEO, but stripping back the mistakes of a lazy SEO firm, meaning you are able to qualify links based on the date that they were acquired, compared against Google algorithm and Guideline updates. 

• Moz Open Site Explorer: ‘Just discovered’ is a great free utility where the most recently discovered links to your site are shown. Taking this data daily would be a quick and digestible method of quality controlling your incoming links once the initial link removal audit is complete. 

• Fresh Web Explorer: from Moz again, this shows you recent mentions of any keyword you put in or links to a specific URL. It even has daily alerts. This can be great for more complex and advanced negative SEO campaigns where false reviews and articles are generated to support malicious links. 

Discussion

Now is the potential Fight Club (The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club) element.  Do or should we openly discuss this topic? I’d be intrigued to read both thoughts on the post and also wider contribution to this current SEO discussion. 

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

MozCon is five months away! What?! And besides my daily countdown to MozCon, provided by the lovely Sha Menz, many of you out there have asked for the juicy details of what we’re planning this year. This year, MozCon is July 14-16 at the Washington State Convention Center.

But before I dive further down: If you’re already planning on coming to MozCon, but haven’t bought your ticket (or your team’s tickets), do it now! Seriously, we’re already almost sold out of early bird MozCon tickets [~60 tickets left], and I know you want to have a happy wallet with a savings of $200.

For the best deal on MozCon tickets, make sure you’re a Moz Pro Subscriber. If you’re not, you can take a 30-day free trial with us and get the Subscriber rate for you and your team—even on trial day number one! Cancel your trial at any time if it’s not for you, and we’ll see you at MozCon.

We say MozCon is “not your typical marketing conference,” but what does that truly mean? Many of you are probably familiar with TAGFEE, our company code, which is woven tightly into MozCon. But what we really aim for is that second E, which stands for Exceptional. Not exceptional in the “really awesome” way, but exceptional as in the exception to the rule (which is in itself really awesome). We want MozCon to be the place where marketers feel the love of being part of this extraordinary community, and where you can spend three days enveloped in new knowledge and actionable information from our forward-thinking speakers to take home with you .

If that’s too mushy for you, just watch the video of what happened last year. :)

It’s all about meeting you!

Before I start talking about the amazing speakers or the bacon, our community—that’s YOU!—drives the force behind MozCon. MozCon humbly started out as the SEOmoz: PRO Training Series because we wanted to meet our community and share face-to-face what we were learning about SEO. As we grew, MozCon became the place for our community to hang out with each other and the industry experts we bring in.

One of our exceptional goals has been to maintain that community camaraderie that much smaller conferences embody. I’m pleased to say that we’ve all leveled up to the challenge.

Roger has lots of friends!

Our beloved mascot Roger joins us for every MozCon. He loves giving hugs. Sometimes he even dances around. One time, we hooked up a Kinect with a dance simulator to the main stage, and late into the lunch break, people could come on stage and dance as Roger! And then Roger danced as Roger. Seriously, you have to see it to believe it.

I’m joined by Roger, Roger, and Rand on the stage.

One of the most magical moments from MozCon 2013 was from Wil Reynolds. After giving his hour-long presentation, Wil gave away a bunch of books, aimed to help people with their careers, and doled out advice to conference goers. He sat on stage talking with and listening to person after person during the lunch break. (Well, until I had to play traffic cop and let our a/v crew set up for the next speaker.) It probably could’ve gone on for hours longer.

Wil signs books and talks with attendees at MozCon 2013.

We also give you the chance to be on stage and share your insights! At MozCon 2012, we launched our community speaker program where we opened up four shorter speaking slots for everyone in our community (YOU) to pitch for.

Every year, we get a ton of emails pitching to speak at MozCon. And for all those emails, I’ve sadly had to reply that we don’t accept pitches because we have a selection committee. But now that we have community speakers, we have a place for everyone to toss their hat in the ring.

The competition is fierce for these spots. Last year, I kept them open for a week and a half and saw 130 responses! Crazy.

Our past speakers are really successful and amazing people, including A. Litsa, Dana Lookadoo, Darren Shaw, Fabio Ricotta, Jeff McRitchie, Mike Arnesen, and Sha Menz. All community speakers get to attend our speaker’s dinner, get a free ticket to MozCon, and of course, get to speak on the MozCon stage.

Every year, our post-MozCon polling says that you love our community speakers, and many of their talks rank highly. We’ll be opening community speaker solicitations no later than the first week of April. Stay tuned!

Mike Arneson owns that MozCon stage!

All throughout MozCon, you’ll have the chance to interact with Mozzers. From marketing and help, to engineering and operations, Mozzers of all stripes use MozCon as a chance to learn who you are. Some are looking for direct feedback about products. MozCon 2013 goers got access to the Moz Analytics beta. And some just want to hear about you: the people who use the products we make, read the blog we’ve fostered, attend the Mozinars we host, and come for MozCon. We’re always elated that people truly join us from around the globe.

Group photo time! All the Mozzers.

Anyone else ever have problems at concerts where you can’t see that stage? At MozCon, our set-up not only ensures there’s not a bad seat in the house, but also that you have plenty of room. You know for your laptop, your tablet, your work phone, your personal phone, your MozCon swag bag, your moleskine, your coffee, your soda, your water, and your issue of Thor #337, which introduces Beta Ray Bill, that you never leave home without.

Attendees sit at tables with power cords and plenty of leg room. MozCon is a fully accessible conference for all attendees. And before you go asking about internet—we know the wifi never works at any conference ever—we’re coming up with some creative solutions. Just stay tuned.

Our speakers are also comfortable with an extra long stage and three huge, stage-to-ceiling (seriously, maybe a three inch gap up there) screens. The middle screen projects their live image and the other two show their presentations. We do our best to ensure that you—yes, you way in the back—can see every bit of the action.

Attendees listen to speakers, but also have room to move around.

We’re happy to say that people come back to MozCon year-after-year, not to just learn, but to hang out with the industry friends that they’ve made. It’s kind of like a big ‘ole family reunion—at least with the family you enjoy.

Friends are just the best thing ever.

Learn all the things!

One of my absolute pleasures in life is working with MozCon’s exceptional speakers. Industry leaders from about every niche in online marketing have graced the MozCon stage, sharing their knowledge, tips, and inspiring you. And me too!

Dana DiTomaso rocks the MozCon 2013 stage!

Our MozCon selection committee works extraordinarily hard to vet and handpick the best speakers. And we continually expect more and more from those who we invite back or invite for the first time when the next year’s conversations start about who should speak. The MozCon stage is large; its audience very enthusiastic and particular; and because of that, I’ve seen seasoned speakers—the people I know you’d love to have at a dinner party to pick their brains—send emails panicked that their presentations won’t be enough. Don’t worry, they always deliver.

Get a taste of MozCon sessions and speaker quality with these two free sessions. One from Kyle Rush from MozCon 2013 on conversion rate optimization and Wil Reynolds from MozCon 2012 on Real Company Shit:

While we’re still working to confirm and select ~11 more speakers for MozCon 2014, here’s who is already signed up: Annie Cushing, Dana DiTomaso, Jeremy Bloom, Justin Cutroni, Kyle Rush, Marshall Simmonds, Nathalie Nahai, Paddy Moogan, Pete Meyers, Phil Nottingham, Rand Fishkin, Richard Millington, Sarah Bird, and Wil Reynolds.

And don’t worry, since MozCon is a single-session conference and we’re all in one big room together, you won’t miss a single presenter!

Let me give you a brief preview of who these amazing people are:

Annie Cushing is an analytics genius and consultant. No, seriously, if there’s something that needs to be reformulated in a spreadsheet and made into a beautifully digestible report for your client, boss, or CEO, she’s your go-to person. Annie’s blog, Annielytics, is full of video tutorials to walk you through the jungles of Excel. This will be Annie’s third MozCon, and in her very popular 2013 session, she spoke about “not provided” and going beyond keywords in your analytics.

Dana DiTomaso has her finger on the pulse of small business and local marketing. She leads as CEO at Kick Point Inc, a small agency. There, Dana regularly plays out David and Goliath type stories with the small businesses she represents. At MozCon 2013, she absolutely wowed our community with her talk about taking SMBs to the next level of marketing. Dana also may have moonlighted as Roger one time.

Jeremy Bloom from Integrate.com, a marketing software company, is new to MozCon, but you might’ve heard of him before. He’s hit the entrepreneur world by storm, raising lots of venture capital and earning kudos and awards from Forbes, American Business Awards, and more. Jeremy is also a three-time World Champion, two-time Olympian, and eleven-time World Cup gold medalist in men’s freestyle skiing. He also had an NFL career with the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers. I think he’ll be the first Olympian and NFL star on the MozCon stage.

Need another heavy hitter? Google Analytics Evangelist Justin Cutroni will be joining us this year. If you need to learn anything about Google Analytics—the more advanced the better!—he probably has the answer. Justin is the author of two books, both on Google Analytics. He’s also a father, skier, and cook.

You know that moment when you find out that quiet person sitting next to you secretly runs the world? That’s Kyle Rush, head of optimization at Optimizely and formerly at The New Yorker and Obama for America. At the latter, he helped the team that transformed how we think about digital campaigns. (Seriously, go watch him talk about this.) Now that’s some serious conversion rate optimization! Kyle also has some adorable dogs.

Are there ever enterprise-level sites that make your jaw drop at how much freaking amazing work went into them? Marshall Simmonds might’ve been the SEO behind them, sites like all the New York Times properties, USA Today, CBS, Toys-R-Us, Gawker Media, and many more. Today, he serves as the founder and CEO of Define Media Group, Inc., an enterprise-level SEO and consulting group. Marshall likes to remind us that he’s “internet old,” meaning that he gave a talk at the SEOmoz: PRO Training Series in 2010.

Leading the field of web psychology, Nathalie Nahai, the web psychologist, will be back on the MozCon stage. Her work delves into how to make your site(s) resonate with your audience based on their culture, gender, or other psychological need. Do you need an image of happy people or authority figures? Nathalie’s got the answer. She’s also an accomplished author and musician and is doing an upcoming free Mozinar with us.

Besides having a name that’s just fun to say, Paddy Moogan‘s an accomplished SEO with a knack for link building, and is head of growth markets at Distilled. He took the stage by storm in 2012, skipped 2013 to hang out with Hobbits in New Zealand, and now’s back for 2014. And we’re ready for Paddy and his love of comic books and Aston Martins (James Bond’s car).

Dr. Pete Meyers. Do I really need to intro this guy? Data scientist here at Moz, Pete’s done some killer projects about our collective obsession with changes in Google’s Algo, including MozCast and the Google Algo History. Recently, he did a Reddit AMA and picks Superman as the winner in a fight against Batman. (I may disagree with this.) We’re crossing our fingers that by July Chicago’s dug itself out of snow, and Pete will be able to make it. :)

Sometimes a pirate, sometimes a video expert, Phil Nottingham is the video strategist at Distilled. He especially enjoys being able to purchase shiny, new video equipment. Last year, Phil tickled the audience pink with his video where he pretended to be Rand for a Whiteboard Friday. His New Year’s resolution is to drink better whiskey; I’m just putting that out there, MozCon goers…

Rand Fishkin, the guy known for his loud shirts and industry championship. Founder of Moz, former CEO, and now an individual e-team contributor, Rand will be speaking to the changes in our industry this year at MozCon. He’s spoken at every MozCon, delivering all those actionable tips and inspirational words. Despite all this, he still blushed as I made him write his own name on the whiteboard as the first chosen speaker for MozCon 2014.

Founder of FeverBee, Richard Millington has made community building into a science. Think community is fluffy? Richard will blow your mind. Make sure to check out his recent free Mozinar. Whether you’re wrangling mommy bloggers, gun enthusiasts, or the ever-popular plumbers, Richard will show you how to start, build, grow, and reach critical mass with your community.

Our brand-new CEO Sarah Bird will take the MozCon stage again. It’s probably one her new job duties she’s most nervous about. Trained as a lawyer, Sarah has a lifelong passion of learning new things and challenging herself. Good thing; we’ve kept her on her toes since 2007! For MozCon, we’re planning on introducing a new format, a fireside chat, with Sarah, so you’ll be able to hear all the good stuff about her and her new role.

Always a crowd-pleaser, Wil Reynolds, founder of SEER Interactive, will be back to give out inspiration like candy in a suburb on Halloween. The first time I saw Wil speak (SearchFest 2012) his rousing speech somehow made me feel confident enough to drive through a snowstorm in a Prius. And minus the snowstorm, I challenge anyone not to feel transformed by a Wil speech. (Go watch his MozCon 2012 talk. MozCon talks age like fine wine.)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Cyrus Shepard, our exceptional emcee. As the Senior Content Lead at Moz, he dreams up ways to drive traffic to our site and pokes people to level up our skills to help. Cyrus keeps speakers on track and facilitates q&a. If you’re worried about his emcee chops, he sent in an audition tape of that time he won a car on Hollywood Squares.

I hope you’re already taking notes of which speakers you can’t wait to see. In the coming months, speakers will be firming up their topics and starting to dive into exactly what they’ll be presenting on at MozCon 2014. They’ll also be joined by around 15 more people, including our four community speakers. While you’ll have to wait for the full agenda until then, you can get an idea of what kinds of talks happen at MozCon through last year’s agenda.

We love hosting you!

We’re excited to bring our community from all parts of the world to MozCon. Whether you live locally in Seattle or have to take two plus connecting flights from either Cape Town, South Africa or Tampa, Florida to reach us, we want to share something new with you.

For those of you boarding planes to MozCon, this year you (or your employer) can save some pennies by flying with either Delta or Alaska Airlines. If flying on Alaska, head to alaskaair.com and use the code ECMV042 for 5% off. If flying on Delta, go to delta.com and use the code NMH7W for 2-10% off, depending on where you depart from.

Once you hit Seattle, we’ve got some special deals with two great hotels, the Grand Hyatt and the Olive 8. Both are located in downtown Seattle, just two blocks away from MozCon, and both are fabulous places to lay your head down after a long day of learning. Not only is there a discount, but MozCon attendees also get complimentary wi-fi and $20 per night parking.

MozCon is the far-right pin, and the two hotels are the other pins. So close!

So we got your shelter and your wifi, your next basic need of bacon is also covered. Did I write bacon? I meant food.

At Moz, we love our food, and since MozCon’s like that big reunion with the good side of the family, we’re going to feed you. Every day of MozCon, you’ll have breakfast, lunch, and two snacks with us. We spare no details. In the past, we’ve had treats like ice cream and crepes for breakfast. Ever dream of conference food? (Are you laughing?) Well, MozCon’s the exception to that.

Okay, what about the bacon? One of our most popular breakfast items is bacon. Last year, two mornings featured all the bacon you can eat. (As a long-time vegetarian, I donate my own bacon portions to one lucky MozCon goer every year.) And for those of us non-bacon eaters, don’t worry, we’ll have that covered too.

Enjoying the grub! Sorry, bacon fans, couldn’t find a bacon-specific photo.

After a day of learning, you’re going to need some downtime. Work hard, play hard, that’s the mantra, right? In years past MozCon’s parties have been hosted at such amazing venues at The Garage, which features a bowling alley, and the Experience Music Project (EMP), Seattle’s own music and sci-fi museum. We’re still nailing down the details, including location, for the Tuesday night bash, but rest assured, you’ll be having the time of your life—while making some great new friends.

Hanging out and having fun at the Tuesday party.

Okay, you’ve come all the way here, and you’ve seen photos of the new MozPlex… Yes, we give office tours!

We don’t do them during MozCon, since we all attend it. But in the days surrounding, we open up the office and share our story and our space with you. We’re super thrilled this year to be able to show off our new digs, which will fully be home sweet home by July. The MozPlex is about eight blocks away from MozCon, so just a short walk through downtown.

MozPlex tour sign-ups will most likely go up in June when we’re much closer to the event.

Joel and Abe in their natural environment at the MozPlex.

We’d be remiss to not give you a welcoming gift (or four) to MozCon. Don’t worry, we always try to fill our swag bags with useful, tasteful, and fun stuff. Last year, attendees were over the moon to get Roger figurines as part of their MozCon haul. While I’m under top-secret orders not to mention what we’re giving away this year, let’s just say I let out some squees.

That’s a lot of Rogers who went out in the world with you.

While you’re in Seattle, don’t forget to visit Seattle! July is the best time to explore our city and the surrounding area. I know sometimes when we go to conferences that we only see beyond the conference and hotel on the to/from airport-hotel drive (I’m just as guilty!). Don’t deprive yourself of digging into the best of Seattle, whether you want to visit the famous gum wall, discover the troll under the bridge, or head out to hike Mount Si. Whet your appetite with Rand’s restaurant and bar guide, and discover amazing Seattle treasures as crowd-sourced by Mozzers.

The great thing about Seattle is that you can be whomever you want to. Whether you’re looking to attend a Sounders game, reenact Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” (I can tour-guide!), take a hot tub boat on Lake Union, or eat pie and see Snoqualmie Falls, Seattle has something for everyone.

Highlights from our party last year include karaoke with a live band.

Take me to MozCon!

For those of you still trying to convince your boss (even if that boss is you!) about the expense, make sure to read the ROI (value vs expense) MozCon post from last year. MozCon’s expenses and our program remains very similar value-wise. And don’t forget to take a 30-day free trial in order to get the Pro Subscriber rate (if you’re not already a Subscriber).

Don’t hesitate to ask me anything about MozCon in the comments; I’ll do my best to answer.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!