Cheaters Never Prosper Unless You’re A Shady Blogger
Okay, you may be asking what’s all the angst about cheaters in the Blogging world. After all, there have always been people cheating the system whether in Blogging, or in life in general…
Cheaters using Black hat tactics and turning the Blogging world upside down
Photo credit: Melodi2 from morguefile.com
Yet, lately I have noticed a massive spike in the number of websites with almost zero ranking factors that are all over the top end of the search results…
Not only this, there are sites using many practises which we are told will get our sites penalized, or maybe even banned.
Yeah, I know! This is nothing new, you say! What I think is new is how some sites are dong this out in the open, and they are not shy in talking of the tactics they use…..
Cheaters are Using Very Nasty Black Hat tactics
Something which is a far more serious issue is that many cheaters are using tactics not to improve their own sites, but to create problems for other websites(competitors sites)….and what the Cheaters are doing is called “Negative SEO“…..
Negative SEO is the practise of flooding(or bombing) a competitors site with thousands of links which then results in a Google penalty, and the site losing it’s ranking positions….
Here’s a fantastic article called Negative SEO a new online Evil written by Gordon Campbell on the UK Guardian website…
Gordon does a great job of outlining just how serious the problem of Cheaters using Negative SEO tactics is….and the article is worth reading….
Many website owners use various so called “white hat” or even slightly “grey hat” SEO tactics to improve their sites, and most people would agree that it’s not an issue, though, as I mentioned in a recent post about the Google Sandbox effect, it seems many cheaters are using “ultra black hat” style tactics, and seem to be getting away with it….for now, anyway..
Thankfully, Google has providing the Google links disavow tool. The Google disavow links tool was created to help webmasters who have been flooded with spam links by cheaters or competitors, so they can try to clean up their websites.
Some sites have received the dreaded ” we have detected unnatural links” message in their webmaster tools…and there has been plenty of talk of sites being bombed with thousands of spam links….
The Online Black Hat Cheaters May Have the Upper Hand—for now!
Though, the truth is that in many cases not even the Google disavow links tools can be of much use if cheaters are using mass link bombing Negative SEO..
So it looks like the year 2013 may be remembered as the year that online cheaters took Negative SEO Black hat tactics to a whole new level, and turned the Blogging world upside down….
Your turn now!
What are your own thoughts and experiences on Negative SEO and the cheaters that use this Black Hat Method?
Danny
Hi Danny,
It makes me sick that people have the nerve to do these kind of things to another persons blog. It’s hard enough to make it online doing everything the right. Now we have people sending spam links to their competitions site.
I am now off to read the post by Gordon Campbell.
Take Care.
Justin recently posted..Why Is Time Speeding Up and Pole Shifts
Hi there, Justin.
Agree 100% with you on this!
There are sites that encourage this type of practise, and they brag about it without any concern…
Those sites are bad enough, though, there are many more sites doing the same thing, only they are not so open about it…
Some people say it’s all part of competition, and whatever get’s the job done is acceptable….(I have read such posts, and people agree with the author’s methods in the comments)…
I think my own site may have got hit recently, and I am cross checking a whole bunch of data to clarify….(I had a large bunch of links(thousands) showing up that were not there before) and I do not do any aggressive back link building just a slow and steady approach….)….it may turn out to be a glitch in the Analytics software I was looking at…(I hope)!
Nice to see you here again, Justin.
All the best for the new year,
Danny
Awesome article. Cheaters never win, but in online business, the sometimes do, but their success through cheating never lasts. But if you really wanna win in the web business, you have to combine the honest and cheating methods. Just my opinion.
Thanks, Ryan.
My definition of cheating in this post relates mainly to people who have gone way over the top and taken it too far….
Many people use a number of tactics that may have been acceptable for websites and online businesses only a few years back, only the climate has changed and now those practises are a big ” no no”….
In those sort of cases, I can sort of relate to their situation…
On the other hand, there are people using some really ” hard core” cheating methods, and for that there is no excuse….
It’s very competitive out there on the web, and this competitiveness will only continue to increase at a very fast rate…this is what pushes people to try different tactics, and sooner or later the tactics may cross over the line and start to break the rules….
This is probably one of the biggest questions online businesses and website need to confront, when asking themselves “How far am I willing to go and what am I willing to do, to achieve the success online”?
Nice to see you here,
Danny