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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

How can it not exist?

You basically take competitors site and run a standard SEO link farm thing on it. Google picks it up and punishes the site, done. What am I missing? How can Google tell the real motive behind detected SEO activity?

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Well the myth is that this will not punish the target site. It's not true which has been clear for a long time, but Matt insists it is.

Matt doesn't want to admit it but we all know it's true. The algorithm punishes shitty links and they can't tell if those shitty links were generated by me to increase my ranking or by a competitor trying to harm my ranking.

Or even whether the site they're punishing is the real target of the SEO at all. For example, there are a bunch of spammy "software index" sites that are basically just lists of free software applications trying to rank highly for people searching for that kind of software. It appears that Google has been penalizing the official websites of some of the software listed on those sites for being linked from lots of spammy sites.

I think its the difference between assigning a spammy link 0 and a spammy link -1 when calculating rank. With the former, I can use a thousand spammy links, knowing that even if only 1% get through, I still benefit.

watch the video in the post, its only 30 seconds long. The question was "does negative SEO exist", listen to the response. :)

               Sorry
 
  Because of its privacy settings, 
  this video cannot be played here.

(edit) - It works now.

errrr- weird, works for me in the US - Ive just opened up the privacy restrictions on it though - try again? thanks for letting me know btw!

Yup, works now, thanks.

What else can he possibly say though? He can't explain how they protect against it, because it would negate the protection, and he can't say that don't do anything, because that would just raise a shitstorm.

Yeah - agreed, Im not really against his position in as much that I realise he's stuck. If he did say "yeah, its possible, and it might screw your business up" then Google would have a massive PR problem.

I've done a fair bit of Cutts baiting in the past, but I do have absolute respect for the man, and the position he's in (we SEO's dont make it easy for him a lot of the time)

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