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System: The following 8 messages were spliced on to this thread from: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5049080.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 9:39 am on Nov 3, 2021 <small>(utc 0)</small>

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If Penguin can demote an entire website and not just the links themselves, what is preventing anyone from carrying a negative SEO attack to demote a website? Is it possible most of the sites that were recently hit were due to Penguin?

"Google Said The Penguin Algorithm May Not Just Ignore Links, It May Target Whole Site"

[seroundtable.com...]

If Penguin can demote an entire website and not just the links themselves, what is preventing anyone from carrying a negative SEO attack to demote a website?

Nothing. Negative SEO is real.

Negative SEO does not work with super authoritative mainstream brands / sites, because those sites have ridiculously big link profiles.

Google wants most organic traffic to go towards those sites anyway, so if smaller sites become collateral damage or victims of negative SEO, why would G even care?

So, when Google representatives say negative SEO is not possible, in a way they are correct, it's not possible on the sites Google actually cares about (the big brands), everyone else (us) can get fcked for all G cares.

Is it possible most of the sites that were recently hit were due to Penguin?

There is no way to know.

Probably not, though. There are many many other things going on.

Does anyone really think that a Penguin site-wide penalty is something new? It has always been the case that if Google could sniff out blatant link manipulation patterns your entire site could get whacked. Negative SEO is real, but is it that effective? The links are usually hacked links inserted through SQL injection is my understanding. Google doesn't pay much attention to low quality spammy links.

What we are seeing now is not the outcome of many sites getting hit with Penguin, it's a concerted effort by Google to keep everyone constantly off balance and hurting for traffic. Since the March update, and also the June update there are many more days where traffic is mysteriously falling than where it is recovering. This is all just manipulation to drive converting traffic to their ads and to their other properties, and to squeeze the organic serps to death because organic provides zero profit to Google. Google has devoured its own original business model and is now an entirely new creature which doesn't depend or even care about organic search. We are all going to be seeing a lot less traffic moving forward, and that is going to be a very painful transition. My sales have been abysmal since the day this all started in March...and getting worse.

Negative SEO is real, but is it that effective? The links are usually hacked links inserted through SQL injection is my understanding. Google doesn't pay much attention to low quality spammy links.

Imagine doing blackhat SEO on your own site. Buying links, excessive guest posts etc.

You then get penalized for link spam.

You just do 100% the same but not for your site but a competitor. It should work just the same.

@mzb44 The difference being that anyone in their right mind would not purchase and point a huge amount of low quality links at their own site. It's too risky. While they would do that to someone else's site.

Traffic is abysmal this morning...much worse than the weekend. Search down 30% and direct down 47% at 11am. USA traffic is off by 40%. Considering that this is a typically busy time of year from now until before Christmas, this is going to kill any hope of sales for the remainder of 2021. 2022 is going to be my first post-Google year...meaning first year where Google plays no significant role in my business. I don't intend to pay them for ads.

@mzb44 The difference being that anyone in their right mind would not purchase and point a huge amount of low quality links at their own site. It's too risky. While they would do that to someone else's site.

People are apparently still doing it all the time and get their sites penalized for it.

Most of these links aren't super obvious trash links. It's abusing otherwise legit guest posts (doing it at a scale) buying links from apparently legit sites but spamming anchor text, etc etc.

People get penalised for link spam all the time and are surprised because they assumed they were clever about it and didn't do blatant spam.

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System: The following 14 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5049080.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 9:32 am on Nov 3, 2021 (utc 0)

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All my top competitors are buying links without any exceptions. All of them are ranking well. If you are penalized for links spam it is a manual action, you are told you are penalized for unnatural link building. I dont think this is something that is hidden.

My mistake was not doing the same at the time. If it works for them why wouldnt it work for me?

My mistake was not doing the same at the time. If it works for them why wouldnt it work for me?

Link spam / blackhat SEO absolutely 100% works, if done right. Always has been.

However, there is a degree of risk involved. You will always have a % chance of getting penalized at some point.

Depending on how you execute your link spam campaigns, that chance could range from very low to very high.

Whoever claims that spamming links doesn't work and will always get you penalised either never did it themselves or is just regurgitating G talking points.

Oh god - the drops keep coming! Feel like I'm in a death spiral.

I have enough data coming in now to assess my current tarffic trends:

1. Global .com sites about normal for this time of the year.

2. However localised .uk sites are down v this summer (out of lockdown) but, at the momemt, running about the same as both 2018 and 2019.

I have to look at historical metrics since the UK sites are not ecommerce sites therefore I am looking at reasonably comparable trading months / quarters, increased trading for these businesses are not affected as much as pure online businesses.

@yollo iirc google announced a two-part update june-july. included cwv. however, i don't believe that cwv is the reason for losing rankings over this time. we have a decent cwv relative to a publisher.

@redbar not a direct competitor to google. not even close. these are all big publishers in my niche. regarding the spam, i really don't notice all that much to begin with, although we do use cloudflare and i do think they block quite a bit. I also block any known offenders who get through on analytics.

I also block any known offenders who get through on analytics.

Do you mean you are blocking them from appearing analytics?

@nick

correct

Traffic reversed second half of yesterday and only finished down 7% on USA traffic...UK traffic was down 21% however. This morning USA traffic is down 46% by 10:30am but traffic from the rest of the world has normalized somewhat. Google keeps my site in a tight traffic and rank range...as soon as it starts to climb out of the lows it gets knocked right back down.

there were times yesterday where it seemed like traffic could be returning to normal levels. however, still ended the day down 11% on google traffic compared to the same day the previous week.

@bebopandrocksteady
You are not "blocking" anything in doing that, you are simply filtering the result so that you don't see the them. You are essentially sticking your head in the sand. That is fine, you likely don't want bot traffic to be reported with your real human traffic. But it is important that you are aware that filtering in analytics is not blocking and these bots are still hitting your server. If you know the IP's used by these bots you can easily block them with Cloudflare. There is one exception to this and that is referral spam.

Referral spam is when a bot makes requests directly to your analytics endpoints. These bots never actually go to your server and thus there is nothing to block, in this case the only solution is to filter them out in analytics.

Despite the ups and downs of our traffic levels I would be interested to know how actual conversions and sales are faring for you all since these changes started rolling out in March and again in June. My online sales have been absolutely decimated since April. Even during the brief periods of stable traffic, my conversions are much lower and the customers are not very serious and have lower (unrealistic) budgets. From beginning of January to end of March it was shaping up to be my best year ever. I think Google has perfected the art of skimming the cream off the top.

[edited by: ichthyous at 4:27 pm (utc) on Nov 2, 2021]

@nick I do know this.

Not to go OT here, but there are solutions found in our Apache Forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

Referral spam is when a bot makes requests directly to your analytics endpoints. These bots never actually go to your server and thus there is nothing to block, in this case the only solution is to filter them out in analytics.

True, but you can block them by referer (sic) when you see them in logs or Analytics. That could help by including a 403 in their request response.

dismal

I am getting only zombies both on my ads and organic

Looks like the sensors are picking up again. I am only affected the next day most of the times so hopefully something will move my away tomorrow.

@not2easy

True, but you can block them by referer (sic) when you see them in logs or Analytics.

I'm talking about a strict definition of referrer spam which is when a malicious bot makes requests to the analytics end-point directly in order to inflate the number of visits from a specific "referrer". Under this definition it impossible to "block" such an attack because the attack is between the attackers computer and Google's server. No requests are ever sent to the "attacked" computer. Certainly if the attack is not as described above and the request includes referrer data in the header then using referrer would be an effective means of blocking.

Traffic is all over the place now on a daily basis. I saw a +15% surge in traffic yesterday...search was +32%, even though direct traffic was still -20%.

Today USA traffic is starting the day -62% and still dropping...UK seems to be slowing to zero and the rest of the world is average. It's all so highly manipulated now that there are no reliable traffic patterns.

usa traffic is horrid today, after a [barely] hopeful day yesterday. with sensors going off [yet again] please tell me this isn't another awful update going out. looks to be. for F sake already... work so hard. head hanging low today

Flat line on conversions for me, after the 1st of November. I'm left with a big amount of spam e-mails / requests / bots only. As usual, I'd say.

I lost 27% of my keywords due to the recent updates. It's quite an amount. I am hoping that this is temporary.