How Garbage Ranks in the SERPs: a Case Study

[JJMcClure]

I should note that I don't believe this was "outing" as the site had already been dropped in the SERPs.

You said that in the article, it was clear to anyone who read all the way to the bottom.

I feel, to conclude there's a high chance someone who knows what he's doing could use a BH technique to knock a competitor out. It's happened in the past with 301s.

Last time you said that I asked if you'd explain how it worked, you didn't reply. The only 301 techniques I know of include hacking the site and if you can hack their site you can take anyone down. It's not the same as using spammy links to do it.

However, since eppie combined what both Grynge and I have been saying (yes, that's what I've been saying, read my posts again although apparently me saying 'net effect zero' and eppie saying 'wasted your time' aren't the same thing....) into one paragraph that everyone seems happy with, maybe just leave it there until someone can provide actual evidence that you can sink a competitor.

[Clinton]

Last time you said that I asked if you'd explain how it worked, you didn't reply. The only 301 techniques I know of include hacking the site and if you can hack their site you can take anyone down.

I'm not going to describe this in too much detail as I'm not sure the one million PhDs at the plex have got a proper grip on this 301 issue yet.

But let's go to what a 301 is - a notice that a page has been permanently redirected. People often use it incorrectly instead of a 404 or a 410. In fact, when the FlippingPlanet forum merges with us shortly I'll 301 that whole domain to this site because I don't give a crap about SEs and I feel a blanket 301 will best serve users who need to get used to the EP layout and culture.

A human visitor can use a bit of common sense and within a few seconds of landing he can work out whether he wants to hang around, whether this forum is likely to give him his answer.

However, to an SE bot trying to crawl flippingplanet.com/forum/ForumThread?1234, the picture is quite different. The bot gets the message that the entire page has moved to the experienced-people homepage. So the bot comes here to the EP homepage and doesn't find anything resembling the content of FP's thread 1234. Or FP's thread 3456 or any of the other thousands of pages. The EP homepage is a bad 301 redirect for individual pages because, as far as the bot (or the bot's master) is concerned, it doesn't host the content the bot is expecting. The bot has been deceived.

This pisses the bot off a bit. The more pages it sees redirected to a single common destination, the more pissed off it gets. This creates an opportunity for a competitor. He can autocreate links to a million non-existent pages at your redirected domain. A smart SE should be able to take this in its stride, but "excessive 301s" have been used in the past to damage competitors in Google SERPs, even take them down!

[[Nobody in their right mind who wants SEs traffic would post publicly like this about a 301 exploit just on the eve of doing a 301 himself. But you know which fingers I hold up to Google traffic. ]]

The excessive redirect is only one of the exploits. The big one is the 301 hijack. I didn't reply to your question the last time to elaborate because I thought everybody knew about 301 hijacking (it's a 302 issue really). If it's something you aren't familiar with go research it now, it makes for interesting reading. As with meta refresh hijacks. They were big in 2004 and millions of sites were damaged by competitors. Google, being the pathetic beast that it is, allowed this to happen for years because they didn't want to get involved in manually correcting hijacked sites and wanted to develop an algorithmic solution... and the million PhD's couldn't/wouldn't solve the problem. That's when I first got disillusioned with Google.

[JJMcClure]

I thought everybody knew about 301 hijacking (it's a 302 issue really). If it's something you aren't familiar with go research it now

I did. You have to hack a site to do a hijack right? That's why I wasn't including it in ways to hurt a competitor using off-site signals.

[Clinton]

You have to hack a site to do a hijack right?

No, you don't. That's only one type of hijack. It seems you're not familiar with this. Let me give you some links.

It was rampant in 2004. Someone I know, Claus, wrote pretty much the defining article on this in 2005. The article is not online any more, but here's a copy from the archive. He was very kind and shared some further information with me privately at the time.

The exploit was still working in 2007:
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/...ade-new-again/

It was still working in 2009:
http://groups.google.com/a/googlepro...ng/gaLBAnNHLl8

And, according to some BH webmasters, it is still working now!
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-3...ack-14291.html

Over half a freaking decade and Google still hasn't plugged this hole and its variations. You can keep believing what a competitor can and can't do, but the evidence is not in your favour, my friend.

[JJMcClure]

It seems you're not familiar with this. Let me give you some links.

You can keep believing what a competitor can and can't do, but the evidence is not in your favour, my friend.

Thanks, I'll read those. If it's so easy to hijack pages, how does anyone maintain any kind of ranking for money phrases?

As for what competitors can and can't do with respect to the conversations recently, I think if you look up 'misunderstood' in the dictionary it lists my name, seriously, am I that bad at making myself understood? I've only ever been talking about links and whether or not you can hurt a competitor by creating spammy links to their site.

Hijacks and hacking are not the same thing and if you can find one post where I've said that they don't work I'll eat my monitor.

[ari]

Y dang pervert. You'd have to be a bot to say that. It's lucrative, and whatever you say it is interesting because it makes money.

I think you really mean to say that you are not trying to exploit that niche right now. Be careful to avoid the messy event - that next week's actions make you look like a porky distributor.

@ari - be careful - the REAL trolls on here can REALLY eat you. They wouldn't even burp ...

I am not trolling anyone. There is a clear pattern of outing sites on SEOMoz that goes back for years. I think SEOMoz fundamentally runs counter to SEO as a small business publisher technique.

Yes, I suppose I should have been more careful about the wording of that post. My answer was intended as a direct answer to the question. Interest = position. I didn't have anything to gain by "outing" that site, which I believe was the inferred intent of the question. Since I'm going to read into it that much, I should note that I don't believe this was "outing" as the site had already been dropped in the SERPs.

Outing is outing is outing.

http://www.sugarrae.com/seo-sphere/r...o-competitors/

[Clinton]

As for what competitors can and can't do with respect to the conversations recently, I think if you look up 'misunderstood' in the dictionary it lists my name, seriously, am I that bad at making myself understood? I've only ever been talking about links and whether or not you can hurt a competitor by creating spammy links to their site.

Meta redirects are links that start with "<refresh" instead of "<a href"

[JJMcClure]

Meta redirects are links that start with "<refresh" instead of "<a href"

Maybe so, but I still wouldn't consider that 'creating spammy links to their site', would you? It's also not what Grynge was discussing, he was talking about 'diluting' link profiles if you recall and my responses were to do with that and not hijacks.

[eppie]

Outing is outing is outing.

Not really. If I did a case study on a site that's using white hat methods to rank, it's not outing. It's just a case study. Why? Because there's no danger of it getting dropped from the SERPs. There's no damage that can be done, so there's nothing to "out."

Same deal with this site. If it's already had its rankings stripped, what's the damage that can be done to it by analyzing how it ranked? None. The only semi-legitimate concern is people who use similar tactics to rank and don't want those thrust into the spotlight... but let's be honest, Google already knows about blog comments and blog networks. Frankly, I think people who complain about "outing" come off looking pretty stupid. As if Google's web spam team would read my post and go, "so THAT'S how those *******s are beating us!"

Meh.

[ari]

Same deal with this site. If it's already had its rankings stripped, what's the damage that can be done to it by analyzing how it ranked? None. The only semi-legitimate concern is people who use similar tactics to rank and don't want those thrust into the spotlight... but let's be honest, Google already knows about blog comments and blog networks. Frankly, I think people who complain about "outing" come off looking pretty stupid. As if Google's web spam team would read my post and go, "so THAT'S how those *******s are beating us!"

Meh.

Spoken by one who has never had his white hat or grey hat sites torched by a Google engineer just because...

To illustrate my point - can we do case studies of your site and clients sites generating at least 20k/m in revenue from organic search, please?