One of my side projects is battling on a difficult keyword. It's going up and made it to top 5 after 3 years. I'm monitoring SEO using ahrefs. 1 year ago I saw a new website going to top position (grammarchecker.net) out of nowhere so I got interested in finding out their "story".
Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other websites starting from page 2 in search results.
Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah 2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me.
How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old could spot.
It is even worse because there are multiple victims - You lose your place in search, people searching get bad results, and people trying to run a forum or any site where there is user content get crushed with SEO spam.
Also note, this guy could be using PBN's, most people who build PBN block the SEO tools(Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, Moz) spider user agents for looking at their site.
Also, he only has 585 referring domains compared to 748k backlinks, so the majority of his backlinks are sitewide backlinks.
You see all those xrummer blog comment links and forum links out there... but that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just there to hide the links that are actually helping the site rank. That's typically done in cases such as the one you're describing. If you can spot it, Google can spot it and just ignores those links.
I've also noticed that comment spam seems to actually work, and have seen mention that nofollow links do contribute to pagerank, although I'd guess they'd contribute less than follow links.
I believe part of the challenge is that if all those unrelated comments sank the domain ... then I could also sink YOUR domain by running xrummer as a weapon against you (creating useless link bait comments). How can Google avoiding weaponizing some of these kind of things?
As a legit biz trying to win legit links, this is such a hassle to deal with.
Perhaps even worse is the rise of "barely legal" blogs... (though these may be the same thing as PBN I suppose), but, by these, I mean, sure, they're original content, original "reviews," and "legitimate" blogs.
But the articles are pumped out en masse, often written in sub-par English, with nothing more than re-wording of a reviewed site's "about us" page. (Perhaps they're even training Markov models on reviewed sites' content?) But they increasingly dominate searches, particularly in the B2B and B2C tech space.
Do these serve customers' search intent? They're simple gateway pages: the content is often not really "readable." But since Google favors "reviews" and pages that link to many other top 10 SERPs, they dominate, vs legit product pages.
Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists. Just endless lists of "alternatives to X," and "rankings of XYZ products" (with next to no legit reviews), or "here's the stack this company uses." All designed to get widespread long tail links.
Google has become significantly less useful for me lately because of this. It’s like a distributed content farm.
Stack Overflow is terrible for it. More often than not the whole first page becomes a bunch of links to the same original SO post, just hosted in different places with different ads on top.
I’m not sure DDG and alternatives are any better, just because of the pure amount of noise that exists on the internet to beat google at their game.
OpenAI recently demonstrated a frighteningly high quality text generator[1] which leaves me concerned about the future.. humanity of the web - no more of those sub-par English articles if a bot writes for you.
Makes me think we'll inevitably see large tracts of the web near-fully automated - information gathering (research) and text generation (writing) for articles based on a simple prompt for that spark of creativity.
Next ten years sure will be interesting on the web.
> Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists
These drive me nuts. I wish there was a way to incorporate trusted users flagging sites like this. I'm sure there's technical issues with it, but ideally it would let you "hide results from this site" to both keep them from popping up _and_ serve as a flag against the site.
I don’t know, maybe it’s expected that the legit businesses pay for advertising?
It’s not like people going to switch to Goggle’s competition.
Excuse my cynicism, it’s just that I can no longer find quality content/service/product in Google, I am over reliant on social media for discovering new things but apparently Google’s businesses is doing great.
Poor english skills are often a stronger indicator that the content is genuine. Search Twitter for a trending hashtag as an example. The vast majority of people in this world can't string words together real good.
Companies "reviewing" their competitors, or at the very least, trying to tag on to their SEO is something I'm seeing a lot of lately. I just don't think most people, when they search for "[product] review" want to hear from the main competitor of said product. Some companies are even sketchier about it, by setting up separate domain names to appear that they are separate.
I'm at the point where I now try to explicitly search sites like Reddit or Quora as Google seems to be full of so much trash and bias / affiliate spam before you find what you want.
To be honest, PBN's are nowhere near as effective as they were a couple of years ago. The chance of getting a manual action against your site is a lot higher.
If you were going to drop a few thousand dollars on buying backlinks, you don't want to have your site de-indexed by Google in 6 months without getting an ROI.
Non-English versions of Google are more linens and are still easy to game for PBN's.
Also, all PBN's are not all created equally. Making sure the domain isn't dropped, different whois details/domain registrars/hosting providers. Also putting relevant links to sites other than what clients have paid for to make this look more legitimate.
Niches with big competition like Pharma/Gambling/Game Hacks/Lead Gen will continue to user PBN's, but bigger SEO's will be diversifying their link building portfolio by building more whitehat links like guest posts and then sending more questionable links like PBN's to them as a tier 2 backlink.
On that note, there's also a technique, forgot the name, but it's basically anti-SEO where they intentionally push a competitor's pages onto a PBN with the intent of getting it detected (and penalized) by Google.
What you describe at the end isn't whitehat. Whitehat (according to Google, from what I can gather) is focusing on site experience and just ensuring search engines are facilitated in indexing.
I wonder why non-English versions of Google are behind on this (I agree that they are), surely much of the Google search algorithm is language independent?
Search for "<my area> plumber" returns totally gamed results. Has for years. No idea why that obvious use case is so broken. My wife hired one and the plumber was useless so I investigated. I've found obvious spam nests of multiple sites with duplicate styling and nothing seems to have changed.
I've had my entire site cloned by scammers looking for content. I fought back by continuing to publish boring and ill-written posts that no one wants to read. That shut them down after a few months.
I don't know why they bothered. As this article notes, content is cheap. You can always find someone to write empty words for pennies. I can see no easy way for Google to combat this apart from boosting trusted sites.
One way to try to raise your PageRank is to submit your own articles to HackerNews, like whalabi just did. Nothing wrong with that - I've done it myself - but it didn't work for me.
Define "Trusted". What does "Trusted" mean? Originally the blue-check mark system was to say "This person that had the handle <X> is really <X>". Now it is more of a status symbol e.g. there are certain people that have had their check-marked removed because of what they have said on the platform. The same will happen, doesn't matter if the site is legitimate i.e. not a spammer, not someone that abuses the algorithm, but it will be due to the "content".
People these days are constantly under attack for what I call "wrong think crimes" is where they disagree on a particular issue (almost doesn't matter what it is) and then they are attacked constantly by groups of individuals who think they are morally superior as they are "thinking correctly".
Any "Trusted" site will be treated the same way. Google will be pressured by a group to remove the trusted status, due to whatever politics are in vogue at the time.
Isn't one of the key ranking factors time users spend on the page? Wouldn't poorly written / empty worded articles cause users to bounce quickly thus causing them to rank poorly?
They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired domains”. The author doesn’t even mention how registrars are a player and part of this, as they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped.
Google has done a lot since 2011 to identify pbns and take them down. This article seems a bit outdated.
Agreed. Also the forum he's referencing to is BlackHatWorld for those curious.
It's well known that some of the sellers on there are artificially inflating their views and replies, and a few of the top sellers are probably using hacked logins to write reviews (their database was leaked a few years ago: https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhat...)
> They are not called “dropped domains”, the term used more often is “expired domains”.
Well they obviously are if they're called something else more frequently. But I've heard them called both, interchangeably with equal frequency. I think this is a bit nitpicky
> they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped.
The thing is, this mostly stopped being relevant about 2ish years later circa 2013-2014. Google massively improved its ability to identify and penalize or discount these things.
You can still make effective PBNs to this day, but the cost to get them to pass the google sniff test is basically on par with just doing legitimate marketing, but carries additional risk.
Given that, most of the serious search marketers I know have long since abandoned these crappy tactics in favor of serving searcher intent and earning relevant links through smart content promotion and outreach. Folks who still buy and sell this stuff are mostly people who haven't updated their skills in a very long time, or those that prey on the same.
A good example is the entire category of “Gardening”. The real content is nearly impossible to find and it’s completely full of blog spam and low quality generic content. The keywords must be valuable so it’s a good indicator of how bad google search has gotten.
And it's an uphill battle to teach "regular people" to not simply click one of the top links on Google and believe what it says. This is especially true for health and wealth topics.
Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance or authority.
Most of these guys will making Amazon affiliate sites where they recommend products throughout their content and make comission when you click on the link.
What I notice is that Google routinely returns fairly random sites that simply take Wikipedia's content and game SEO so they show up for "wiki <term>." Those results come and go. Google clearly does a lot of customisation for particular concerns, given how important Wikipedia is, I'm surprised to see these occasional results.
One of my first freelancing gigs was for a guy who maintained one of these.
He peddled this pills and had built an impressive (by 2009 standards) network of 87 WP installs with generated crap in them that linked heavily with each other, all on this OVH instance and had managed to break one of the plugins he used for this purpose, so he posted a bid on GetAFreelancer, which I won and never saw a cent for.
I'm still really pissed about that for some reason.
A lot of search results in my native language return totally garbage results where clearly they just scraped for keywords and then threw them on a site. Another tactic is to Google Translate articles from other languages, which obviously ends with a totally unreadable post, but it still ranks well because it hits some keywords.
It's actually weird that these rank so high. The very least Google used to do well was to filter this garbage. I can understand them losing the SEO battle, but that they fail to filter straight-up spam is quite interesting.
The big G has gotten comfortable and complacent atop their throne.
Search quality has been on the decline for a while now, but in the past 3-6 months it's gotten really really bad for anything that isn't mainstream and popular.
I have more "showing results for XYZ, do you want to see results for your actual query QRS?" than just showing QRS.
Yeah, I do, that's why I typed it.
> 10 results for QRS. Still irrelevant and excluding words, even in quotes
The search team must have lost a lot of talent recently, it's amateur hour.
Years ago, I once googled my name to find someone with the same name in the UK who was a bit of a fluffy motivational speaker. I laughed, and forgot about him.
A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different. He pushed me off the front page.
Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did.
Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at that one!
Interestingly enough my blog that had little traffic (at best 15000 page views and probably 2 or 3 comments per month) also had some posts cloned. Not even necessarily the most popular ones.
It's funny, we used to go to Dogpile or Jeeves when Yahoo's results were crap and you couldnt be bothered to go search Lycos, Altavista and dozen others (and all the hyper-specialized ones). Then Google hit the scene and it gave equal or better results than the aggregators.
Now Google themselves gives dodgy or inconsistent results that incentivize one to look elsewhere, but I don't think it is entirely their fault-- charlatans can crank out chum content faster than it can be analyzed and indexed. Google is doing the best the can...they have their own financial interests but they happen to align with ensuring people trust their results.
The scale and nature of the web these days is very different than it was in '96. There was a competing engine popping up every year-- an endless cycle of "___ sucks, use ___ instead."
But I haven't heard of anything other than Google and DDG since Cuil failed.
They would likely work in a similar way, being susceptible to the same tactics.
Imho, the main problem is that there's no deterrent. Even if you get caught doing some very black hat stuff, worst thing that can happen is to get a manual penalty. Remove the outlawed stuff, wait a month or two, submit a reinclusion request and you're back in business. If it was a "once you're caught, you're out for good" thing, SEOs would tread much more carefully.
Google is to blame as much as these people who are gaming their search.
The number one tip most SEO blogs cite these days is to use AMP. It can skyrocket a crummy site over a non AMP site with much better content for many trending keywords.
I find that this type of thing is equivalent to gaming the search results as it would be by doing low quality blogs. Just this time the hack is offered by the G itself.
I think they are boosting ranking for Google Aanalytics integrated sites with DoubleClick cookies running. If you remove or change analytics Google tanks your ranking. I ran experiments including google ads for a few months a couple of years ago. They set me up with an account manager who moved me to a new analytics account that added Doubleclick cookies. I've been trying to remove the advertising cookies since then and it's impossible from within the Analytics console. If I plug in a new Analytics account my SEO placement tanks. I feel like it's a racket that gives away my site's user data in exchange for rankings. Help!
It's definitely all about capital now. The algorithms are just not smart enough to make accurate judgements in such a competitive landscape... It might have worked a few decades ago when competition was low, but now the idea that an algorithm can outsmart an army of human SEO experts is ridiculous.
I wonder if things would be better if Google went back to the old approach of Yahoo which involved hiring humans to manually rank the pages (at least partially). I think search results would be significantly better.
Always. I had been in touch with this industry until 2010 and that was as easy (and profitable) as if it was a feature, intended this way. Later on, as far as I know, algorithms have changes a couple of times but that didn't change much, just minor inconvenience SEO guys routinely adapt to. If I didn't care about people's jobs and wasn't libertarian I'd say SEO should be outlawed.
[+] [-] chimen|6 years ago|reply
Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other websites starting from page 2 in search results.
Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah 2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me.
How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old could spot.
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Matsta|6 years ago|reply
Also note, this guy could be using PBN's, most people who build PBN block the SEO tools(Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, Moz) spider user agents for looking at their site.
Also, he only has 585 referring domains compared to 748k backlinks, so the majority of his backlinks are sitewide backlinks.
[+] [-] bhartzer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whalabi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milesskorpen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WC3w6pXxgGd|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bluepeter|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps even worse is the rise of "barely legal" blogs... (though these may be the same thing as PBN I suppose), but, by these, I mean, sure, they're original content, original "reviews," and "legitimate" blogs.
But the articles are pumped out en masse, often written in sub-par English, with nothing more than re-wording of a reviewed site's "about us" page. (Perhaps they're even training Markov models on reviewed sites' content?) But they increasingly dominate searches, particularly in the B2B and B2C tech space.
Do these serve customers' search intent? They're simple gateway pages: the content is often not really "readable." But since Google favors "reviews" and pages that link to many other top 10 SERPs, they dominate, vs legit product pages.
Not far on the list of deplorables is the rise of the "tech stack" lists. Just endless lists of "alternatives to X," and "rankings of XYZ products" (with next to no legit reviews), or "here's the stack this company uses." All designed to get widespread long tail links.
[+] [-] ljm|6 years ago|reply
Stack Overflow is terrible for it. More often than not the whole first page becomes a bunch of links to the same original SO post, just hosted in different places with different ads on top.
I’m not sure DDG and alternatives are any better, just because of the pure amount of noise that exists on the internet to beat google at their game.
[+] [-] whalabi|6 years ago|reply
OpenAI recently demonstrated a frighteningly high quality text generator[1] which leaves me concerned about the future.. humanity of the web - no more of those sub-par English articles if a bot writes for you.
Makes me think we'll inevitably see large tracts of the web near-fully automated - information gathering (research) and text generation (writing) for articles based on a simple prompt for that spark of creativity.
Next ten years sure will be interesting on the web.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/17/openai-text-generator-dang...
[+] [-] cloverich|6 years ago|reply
These drive me nuts. I wish there was a way to incorporate trusted users flagging sites like this. I'm sure there's technical issues with it, but ideally it would let you "hide results from this site" to both keep them from popping up _and_ serve as a flag against the site.
[+] [-] mrtksn|6 years ago|reply
It’s not like people going to switch to Goggle’s competition.
Excuse my cynicism, it’s just that I can no longer find quality content/service/product in Google, I am over reliant on social media for discovering new things but apparently Google’s businesses is doing great.
[+] [-] dsl|6 years ago|reply
Poor english skills are often a stronger indicator that the content is genuine. Search Twitter for a trending hashtag as an example. The vast majority of people in this world can't string words together real good.
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|6 years ago|reply
I'm at the point where I now try to explicitly search sites like Reddit or Quora as Google seems to be full of so much trash and bias / affiliate spam before you find what you want.
[+] [-] Matsta|6 years ago|reply
To be honest, PBN's are nowhere near as effective as they were a couple of years ago. The chance of getting a manual action against your site is a lot higher.
If you were going to drop a few thousand dollars on buying backlinks, you don't want to have your site de-indexed by Google in 6 months without getting an ROI.
Non-English versions of Google are more linens and are still easy to game for PBN's.
Also, all PBN's are not all created equally. Making sure the domain isn't dropped, different whois details/domain registrars/hosting providers. Also putting relevant links to sites other than what clients have paid for to make this look more legitimate.
Niches with big competition like Pharma/Gambling/Game Hacks/Lead Gen will continue to user PBN's, but bigger SEO's will be diversifying their link building portfolio by building more whitehat links like guest posts and then sending more questionable links like PBN's to them as a tier 2 backlink.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fasicle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richardw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewStephens|6 years ago|reply
I don't know why they bothered. As this article notes, content is cheap. You can always find someone to write empty words for pennies. I can see no easy way for Google to combat this apart from boosting trusted sites.
One way to try to raise your PageRank is to submit your own articles to HackerNews, like whalabi just did. Nothing wrong with that - I've done it myself - but it didn't work for me.
[+] [-] davesmith1983|6 years ago|reply
People these days are constantly under attack for what I call "wrong think crimes" is where they disagree on a particular issue (almost doesn't matter what it is) and then they are attacked constantly by groups of individuals who think they are morally superior as they are "thinking correctly".
Any "Trusted" site will be treated the same way. Google will be pressured by a group to remove the trusted status, due to whatever politics are in vogue at the time.
[+] [-] fasicle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhartzer|6 years ago|reply
Google has done a lot since 2011 to identify pbns and take them down. This article seems a bit outdated.
[+] [-] Matsta|6 years ago|reply
It's well known that some of the sellers on there are artificially inflating their views and replies, and a few of the top sellers are probably using hacked logins to write reviews (their database was leaked a few years ago: https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhat...)
For example, take a look at this thread: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-sparrow-2019-...
Thousands of replies that all sound very similar "Order confirmed Transaction ID: XXX"
[+] [-] cookie_monsta|6 years ago|reply
Well they obviously are if they're called something else more frequently. But I've heard them called both, interchangeably with equal frequency. I think this is a bit nitpicky
> they auction off the more valuable domains even before they are dropped.
Ummm... even before they expire? :)
[+] [-] krisroadruck|6 years ago|reply
The thing is, this mostly stopped being relevant about 2ish years later circa 2013-2014. Google massively improved its ability to identify and penalize or discount these things.
You can still make effective PBNs to this day, but the cost to get them to pass the google sniff test is basically on par with just doing legitimate marketing, but carries additional risk.
Given that, most of the serious search marketers I know have long since abandoned these crappy tactics in favor of serving searcher intent and earning relevant links through smart content promotion and outreach. Folks who still buy and sell this stuff are mostly people who haven't updated their skills in a very long time, or those that prey on the same.
[+] [-] jaequery|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtwo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blunte|6 years ago|reply
Sadly, it seems most people cannot distinguish between content provided by people with a genuine interest and knowledge between "content" of no substance or authority.
[+] [-] Matsta|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chewz|6 years ago|reply
But DDG in my native language? OMG. 99% results is machine generated, machine translated fake sites. It feels like walking in endless landfill.
[+] [-] davidy123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llao|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liveoneggs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cfv|6 years ago|reply
He peddled this pills and had built an impressive (by 2009 standards) network of 87 WP installs with generated crap in them that linked heavily with each other, all on this OVH instance and had managed to break one of the plugins he used for this purpose, so he posted a bid on GetAFreelancer, which I won and never saw a cent for.
I'm still really pissed about that for some reason.
[+] [-] ErikAugust|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emerongi|6 years ago|reply
It's actually weird that these rank so high. The very least Google used to do well was to filter this garbage. I can understand them losing the SEO battle, but that they fail to filter straight-up spam is quite interesting.
[+] [-] huffmsa|6 years ago|reply
Search quality has been on the decline for a while now, but in the past 3-6 months it's gotten really really bad for anything that isn't mainstream and popular.
I have more "showing results for XYZ, do you want to see results for your actual query QRS?" than just showing QRS.
Yeah, I do, that's why I typed it.
> 10 results for QRS. Still irrelevant and excluding words, even in quotes
The search team must have lost a lot of talent recently, it's amateur hour.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|6 years ago|reply
A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different. He pushed me off the front page.
Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did.
Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at that one!
[+] [-] reallydontask|6 years ago|reply
The cloned posts ranked higher than my blog posts
[+] [-] smt88|6 years ago|reply
If we had many important engines with many algorithms, it might dilute any particular tactic that SEO uses.
[+] [-] jstarfish|6 years ago|reply
Now Google themselves gives dodgy or inconsistent results that incentivize one to look elsewhere, but I don't think it is entirely their fault-- charlatans can crank out chum content faster than it can be analyzed and indexed. Google is doing the best the can...they have their own financial interests but they happen to align with ensuring people trust their results.
The scale and nature of the web these days is very different than it was in '96. There was a competing engine popping up every year-- an endless cycle of "___ sucks, use ___ instead."
But I haven't heard of anything other than Google and DDG since Cuil failed.
[+] [-] luckylion|6 years ago|reply
Imho, the main problem is that there's no deterrent. Even if you get caught doing some very black hat stuff, worst thing that can happen is to get a manual penalty. Remove the outlawed stuff, wait a month or two, submit a reinclusion request and you're back in business. If it was a "once you're caught, you're out for good" thing, SEOs would tread much more carefully.
[+] [-] superasn|6 years ago|reply
The number one tip most SEO blogs cite these days is to use AMP. It can skyrocket a crummy site over a non AMP site with much better content for many trending keywords.
I find that this type of thing is equivalent to gaming the search results as it would be by doing low quality blogs. Just this time the hack is offered by the G itself.
[+] [-] d7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptica|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if things would be better if Google went back to the old approach of Yahoo which involved hiring humans to manually rank the pages (at least partially). I think search results would be significantly better.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|6 years ago|reply
If google knows who the robots are, and who the humans are, there’s a lot more human input to outweigh a human SEO team managing a team of bots.
And google can probably determine which users are best at determining page value and weight their input highly.
[+] [-] Matsta|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|6 years ago|reply