The majority of these tactics strike me as sleazy, but they almost exclusively work because search engines don't realize they're being gamed. And as search engines get better at recognizing these tactics (e.g. font size of 0), they stop working. The big search engines in 2019 are generally smart enough to ignore this stuff.
What concerns me more is when the search engines themselves are complicit in anti-user tactics.
One example is the loosening of restrictions, particularly by Google, around cloaking.
Google used to come down very hard on cloaking, where you show different content to a search engine's bot than you do to a visitor who arrives from a search engine.
The reason it used to disallow cloaking is because users hate it. Nobody wants to see a search result that appears to answer their query, only to find out when they arrive on the page that the content is inaccessible unless they pay for an expensive membership to the site.
One little happy loophole this creates, however, is if you set your browser agent to be the GoogleBot's ID, it will immediately bypass most paywalls because it thinks its letting the crawler in.
One thing I noticed not mentioned is whether it is possible for there to be a negative SEO attack on these agencies to try and get them blacklisted. I work for an e-commerce company and we've seen comment spam and all sorts linking back to us which we certainly didn't initiate. So black-hat SEO isn't always black and white.
Who knows. If you are concerned you could always "disavow" thru Google. Or just go to Fiverr and for $5 spam your competitors with bad links to level the playing field. It's all such a freaking joke these days
But yeah, there are definitely a few ways to get free links from large sites/organisations and influencers via tricks like this. Seen quite a few SEO companies sponsoring scholarships for much the same reason.
Expert roundups are another good example of that too. Ask a bunch of popular people about something on Twitter or what not, put the quotes into an article and then get them to link back to it/share it with their followers.
Top hit is a half-assed Unity clone called "Falco 3D Engine", produced by the same company (person?) that churns out mounds of banner- and malware-stuffed free "games" of similar quality. It would appear that they somehow leverage their massive installation base from these games to force Google into ranking pages of their choice higher than they would naturally.
I'm a moderator/admin on echojs. What's funny is that all the links are rel="nofollow" and still I delete 2-5 posts a day that are anything from outright spam to blogspam that is all unrelated and/or useless. The comment spam is even worse on most sites, and I'm not sure what the real solution might be.
With new legislation all over the world, particularly in the EU, it's going to be harder and harder to create content or let users interact. Which is moving ever away from the core of the internet's creation which is letting people make stuff. Sites want to be both publishers and platforms and are starting to actively censor. Even if I disagree with the content it's a really slippery slope and already starting to see a lot of unintended consequences.
It really feels like we're heading into the internet dark age.
Google's process goes nowhere and I can vouch having submitted dozens of links.
Classic example is that websites can set the rating and number of reviews themselves even if it is completely fraudulent e.g. "melbourne cheap movers". Does Google care ? Nope.
I've used it multiple times, never got a reply or saw a change. I believe it's mostly like the thumbs-down for comments on YouTube: the user feels like they did something but it has no actual meaning.
My theory? You can't automate the analysis of these reports (if they could, why didn't they catch it in the first place) so it basically goes into a "black hole" never to be addressed. I only base this wacky, baseless theory on Google's overall obsession with automation, which of course keeps staff low and profits high.
Yeah, it certainly seems that way. It feels like you'll have a better chance "reporting" to Google by going viral on Twitter, HN etc, than by actually reporting it to Google.
Ironically, giving a thumbs down on a YouTube video actually helps its' organic rating within the site. As far as I am aware, they basically add both upvotes and downvotes together to show total votes and rank it on engagement based on the total number.
I know this from my own videos. Some of my best ranking organic videos are videos that have the most downvotes.
I was talking about the thumbs down for comments, not videos. I believe you're right that they rank videos for engagement, which can be both positive or negative.
I think of it like sending a Windows app crash report to Microsoft. There's almost no possibility that anyone looks at any given problem, but if a million other people submit the exact same crash then maybe it'll show up at the top of some list and get some attention.
> Obviously a top post on HN gets you more attention
Yeah, it seems this is what tech people do nowadays (the other day there was a HN post from a company who got banned from PayPal after 12 years...).
It's a bit like publicly tweeting a complaint and mentioning the offending company's Twitter handle, so it seems "social media shaming" has reached HN too.
Sorry to tell you this, but it's been on HN for awhile now. I remember seeing it back when I signed up in 2012. It's always been a good site to get more exposure to certain tech problems.
1.) A .marketing tld is an odd choice for someone who claims to run an SEO (or any kind of ad) agency.
2.) The writer has gone to great lengths to hide most references to the names of some offending competitors...yet, they left full meta descriptions. In other cases, the author seemed to mock company names.
3.) The article is poorly written and rife with grammatical errors. English is tough and we didn’t all grow up writing so, so it’s in poor taste to point out another’s writing issues. But, speaking as someone who is pretty good at SEO, at this point, the only ‘trick’ that works is to release and promote well written articles.
4.) Nothing in this is particularly black hat. Does anyone believe that setting a link’s height to 0 actually works in 2019? And the rest of the tactics are par for the course in a sketchy industry.
Between those four things, I just can’t trust the author. This article was hard to read, uninformative and ultimately serves as a horrible branding device. If an SEO is this poor at marketing him or herself, why??
Reminds me of an ex-boss of mine (and a pretty smart one, at that).
He left the company I was working for to manage IT at his father's smaller company. Needless to say that he soon received a visit by some "SEO specialists".
So he received that visit of two well dressed, soft spoken dudes who offered their services asking them: "What's your company name again?"
Typing it into Google his next question was: OK, so you're high powered SEO specialists. Would you mind explaining why your own company is not to be found in the first two pages of Google's search results when I search for you company by name?"
> 1.) A .marketing tld is an odd choice for someone who claims to run an SEO (or any kind of ad) agency.
One of the biggest SEO myths is that Google penalizes for these unusual TLDs. What’s really going on is that a .com/.net/.org is likely to simply be older and more trusted than a .marketing, resulting in higher rankings.
All else equal there is no difference to Google when it comes to the TLD.
Let’s look at this particular domain. Serendipz.marketing. Serendipz.net and .org are both currently available.
Which would you trust more?
I have never seen any research that suggests that a vanity tld like .marketing is as trusted as a generic tld like .net or .org. I have, however, read troves of research that suggest the opposite - that vanity tlds are less trusted.
I think we’re confusing 2 kinds of trust: personal trust in a business and Google’s trust in a domain for SEO purposes.
For SEO purposes there is no downside to TLD:
> Overall, [Google’s] systems treat new gTLDs like other gTLDs (like .com and .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.
As far as personal trust goes, I remember that I am not the audience. Yes, .marketing seems weird to me, but I am not the owner of a small business looking for SEO services. Maybe it is impressive to them? Maybe they never notice the domain because they find the site by Googling and never type it themselves?
I’m sorry, but I’m not talking about whether Google trusts vanity tlds. I’m talking about consumers. I’ll rephrase my last paragraph, though I don’t know how to make it more clear.
I have never read one single piece of remotely credible research that suggests that consumers trust vanity tlds as much as a generic tld. However, I have read a lot of research that suggests the opposite - consumers trust generic tlds more than vanity.
Can you show me some credible research that says that small business owners are impressed by .marketing? Preferably research released by people who don’t sell vanity tlds.
> The article is poorly written and rife with grammatical errors. English is tough and we didn’t all grow up writing so, so it’s in poor taste to point out another’s writing issues. But, speaking as someone who is pretty good at SEO, at this point, the only ‘trick’ that works is to release and promote well written articles.
Yep, this is how I read it too. The whole time this felt like a non-native English speaker wrote this article. It isn't just that it suffered grammatical errors and poor writing, but it certainly reads like it is a non-native English speaker. Since it is an SEO company in Seattle, WA - this seemed surprising to me.
This is old news. This is old blackhat from 2005. Get with the new evil programs, writer.
I'm up against what I can only describe as "company spam."
Software company creates multiple llc's to market the same software product with slightly different names or names similar to legit companies. It works like a charm to clog up Google results. And if one gets dinged by Google, just crank up another company with a "headquarters" in Nevada.
When I worked for an agency, I like to think they pitched 'white-hat' SEO.
The sell to clients was that there was no magic snake-oil involved, it was:
1. Make your website easy for Google to digest (which could involve some dev work, fixing bugs and markup, speeding up sites, mobile websites)
2. Understand what your market is and what they might be after (which led to a lot of analytical work)
3. Make quality content that makes you an authority (which involves content strategy, and cross-sells into copy and creative)
4. Properly promote your content for backlinks (the agency had a lot of success with promoting creative pieces to sites with strong link equity, such as Daily Mail Online etc.)
SEO is a dirty term, but a strategy for creating what is useful and can actually strengthen brands isn't evil.
#3 can devolve into a bunch of competing content farms that end up burying the legitimate information from people who know and care. #4 is just the reality of modern journalism, but it's still pretty darn disappointing that "journalism" is so strongly influenced by and often consists of PR.
One reason google is an effective search engine is society has incentives to make their stuff findable. It’s not just magic algorithms. The perception of Google’s quality is as much because we all know when we write an article how to make informative titles and content, and knowledge if we’re too spammy we’ll be punished. Eventually black hat SEO suffers in the long run.
I work in search, and one huge reason a given companies enterprise or site search sucks is because content authors don’t care about making their content findable by search. A search system is a series of social incentives to make attractive, findable search results, not just technology.
> The perception of Google’s quality is as much because we all know when we write an article how to make informative titles and content, and knowledge if we’re too spammy we’ll be punished.
Errr, I personally hate the top articles google presents me for pretty much every query. Keyword stuffed long-winded texts that hide the information they are promising in the headline somewhere in multiple irrelevant paragraphs or just don't provide it at all. To me, Google's perceived quality has fallen significantly over the past five years.
The same here. I usually just click "page 5" and then hit a few "results" that look promising to find an entry into the "sub-bubble" of that particular niche.
Let's say there is a blog post amongst the mix. I'll check out the blogger's Twitter and see who he follows. Stuff like that. Depends heavily on the niche of course.
> Advertising is like hacking the free market and should be illegal. Not the best product wins, but the one with the largest advertising budget.
Who decides what is the 'best' product? If advertising were illegal then how do people find out about products? Seems to me if advertising were illegal there would be no free market.
Impartial consumer advocacy groups comparing products on open, fair and repeatably measurable factors, for one.
> If advertising were illegal then how do people find out about products?
Same way people found out before advertising existed: word-of-mouth, trade fairs, product catalogs... and the question is always, does the world NEED the new product?
Is it beneficial for society if supermarkets carry literally dozens of different brands of simple plain white yogurt, of which half goes to waste because people mostly buy the cheap white label stuff?
Do we actually even need brands as a society? For many common goods the brand is actually irrelevant already. Think HDMI cables - as long as it carries a legal certificate that it conforms to HDMI specs, I don't care if the cable is from Amazon, Mediamarkt, or whatever the name of the Alibaba or ebay shop is. And I won't have any benefit from shelling out 10k bucks for a 20m cable over one that costs 20 bucks.
As societies, we definitely need to have a proper democratic debate and vote on how we want to (re)shape the relationship between consumers and producers. The current way is unsustainable.
>Same way people found out before advertising existed: word-of-mouth, trade fairs, product catalogs
I didn't downvote your comment but here's a fyi about the pervasiveness of advertising if you didn't already know...
Trade fairs are actually a form of "advertising". For example, a trade show selling a 10ft-by-10ft booth is essentially selling a 100 sqft "ad slot". The "ad inventory" for sale is the whole trade show floor. When companies spend money for a trade show booth, they categorize it in their financial accounting as "marketing budget".[0]
Product catalogs are often partially funded by sponsors that are featured in the catalog.
As for "word of mouth", the 1st person that started the chain of recommendations was often exposed to advertising.
Of course that are forms of advertising, but these were the tools of the trade for thousands of years.
Modern advertising h(a)unting us wherever and whenever we go is a fairly modern innovation, but society and regulations have not caught up with it by far. Widespread influencer marketing for anyone but ultra-big brands able to buy product placements in movies would have been beyond unimaginable until the advent of smartphones where every tiny hotel has the opportunity to have global reach for, essentially, paying a flight and the cost of the stay for the influencer.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Targeted advertising is also something that only got possible and mass-affordable in the last two decades, and the mechanisms that make it work are deeply cutting into everyone's privacy. It isn't actually even possible any more to live any kind of modern life without your data ending up at the big tech companies' silos to be mined for ads - have a brick-style cellphone and give the number to a friend? Facebook and Whatsapp, as well as Google, now know your name and phone number. Order something online? The cloud provider hosting the (mail) infrastructure of the shop has your data and knows what you've ordered. These days one can't even go "offline shopping" anymore as the tape-backed gross quality anti-theft cameras got replaced by HD or 4K capable sensors with backend infrastructure that enables real time face identification and motion tracking, probably even eye tracking now, to watch your every blink while strolling through the aisles.
Thanks to modern open source libraries I can probably throw together a MVP store tracking system in a day or two. This kind of tracking is a commodity now, in a total free-for-all world, and aside from GDPR society hasn't had any kind of debate on that. And that's just the stuff that you literally cannot evade - the things people do willingly in exchange for reward programs, cashbacks and the likes are even more encompassing.
There should be a service to research, test, benchmark, and otherwise review products. I'd pay for a service like that, and would expect them to never ever accept any kind of compensation from companies making the products they review.
The same way I find out about non-advertised yogurt. I go to the grocery shop and choose one based on information displayed on the packaging (which you can count as advertisement if you are pedantic) and my needs. If it was good then I keep buying it and tell my friends and family about it. "Good wine needs no bush."
How do I then find out about new products? New ideas that myself or my friends don't know about? Do I rely on the creator's friends spreading the word until I see it? Word of mouth only works so well.
Also, the supermarket analogy falls short when the number of "products" is extremely large and you rely on search. Seems more like the equivalent of going to a very large supermarket in the dark with a flashlight.
It’s not pedantic. People have limited time, and stores have limited space, so how do you propose a product get chosen to occupy this time and space versus the competition?
At some point, someone has to market, advertise, or convince someone else that their product or service is worth the other person’s time, money, and space. Whether or not it’s between grocery store and brand, or brand and consumer, it’s still advertising/marketing.
Of course, it can be taken too far, but with rules such as requiring objectively true disclosures, we can strive to strike a balance.
Stores actually charge for preferred locations within the store/product section. They also charge for end-cap locations etc. There are lots of marketing options for within the store alone, and is generally even then still less biased than typical advertising.
The problem is between advertising and inconsistent/misleading studies, you cannot trust any person, product or company at this point and imho the system itself will fall over eventually and there will be restrictions and regulation that follows.
Hence taxpayers should vote for sufficiently funded pro consumer organizations such as FTC, CFPB, FCC, FDA, EPA, etc. that hold those responsible for fraudulent claims.
A lot of the problem is some have, others go over the top. Also, taxpayers don't vote on funding and even then, most federal spending is poorly organized and structured. I'd rather see more legislation that lets more private consumers and private orgs sue for violation instead of only relegating enforcement to those oversight orgs alone.
Quality of life for everyone has been greatly improved by those working in America's civil government organizations. Obviously there will be corruption and the pendulum swings too far at some point, but given the list of recent crises, over regulation is clearly not the problem.
If we want accountability, then we should demand transparency. Data should be posted online so that it can be vetted and double and triple checked.
I'm absolutely in favor of more transparency... In fact, as far as I'm concerned any orgs that do political advertising or funding of any kind should be required to have 100% transparent funding and not be able to accept donations from companies that aren't. Same should apply to all politicians running for high-level offices.
For the most part minimal government with restrictions on corporations to ensure the most broad transparency and limited collective "rights" would be best IMHO. I consider myself a pragmatic libertarian. A lot of people equate that with being Corporatist or anti government.
I just feel that most people would be better off finding private solutions for the most part. Any time a large corporation and/or governments get involved it feels more likely to end up for the worse. The driver being when corporate bodies and politicians lie.
Spreading awareness is essential when you want to sell anything. This happens since the dawn of human society in the street when shopkeepers call out passersbys to sell their wares. What other means do you have?
Impartial organizations (maybe like Consumer Reports?), providing dispassionate listings of products and product categories for a fixed listing fee to evaluate the claims made by a product.
They can never hope to test all products out there. There are more products available every day than they have manpower to test. And even their tests are biased in their own ways. There is no objective measure to test everything.
Just making a good product people actually have use for. I can't think of a single useful thing I own that I've disovered via someone advertising to me.
When you have literally billions of products out there, there is no way one can make a new product and have it sell without doing any form of advertising or sales activities. Plus, what is true for you is not true for just everyone out there.
I'm mostly talking about the kind of ads an adblocker can take care of. Those are the ones I'd like to be outlawed, anyway. Oh, and the ones people stuff into my mail box, despite a clear label to not do such a thing. And the ones plastered all around the city on big boards. Basically everything that is annyoing.
I'm someone that blocks all ads. It works perfectly well. Whenever I have a need to buy something, I do the research myself. I do not buy things I do not need.
I have a different take: Advertising is hacking. More theft, less a catalyst for needs fulfillment.
We live and function within an attention economy. Advertisement funded business models can only compete for our attention. Preferential attachment leads to power law distribution of activity. The mathematical result is called laissez faire, "winner takes all", fads, last stage capitalism, "the free market".
Agree that advertising should be illegal.
A conclusion that tortures me.
I worked on recommenders for a fashion retailer. As a consumer, I desparately want help finding the products just for me. As an insider, trying to address my own wants and desires, I couldn't even sell "a shirt that fits" to myself. Because in practice, recommenders are just another mirror, filter bubble, echo chamber, preferential attachment redux.
If I'm ever presented with a recommendation (advertisement) which satisfies a need -- fashionable, technical, practical, whatever -- it's little more than an accident.
Oh well.
Maybe the "personalization" craze will fare better.
No, not always. Microsoft spent a ridiculous amount of money to advertise Bing and it brought them no share at all. Where did you get the idea that advertising trumps everything?
But using semantic markup is good for reasons other than SEO (e.g. it's a must for accessibility). "White-hat SEO" just amounts to "producing useful content"--anything beyond that is essentially gaming the system.
Wrong, I think white-hat SEO is in making sites that do rank well in search-engines because it fits the criteria the search engines have outlined for sites that are user-friendly: clear outlines, no usability-killing scripts, friendly urls, fast, etc...
In other words: sticking to the spirit of the law, not the letter.
It's true that SEO in isolation is a bit pathological on its own — it should always be thought as a part of a broader UX strategy.
If you want to rank, 95% is links, not technical SEO. I agree of course, that making your site work well is important, but that usually won't get you any top rankings.
The latest trend is to simply rent subdomains or directories on large websites (newspapers, magazines, tv stations), including header/footer links from the main page. Works like a charm, whatever you publish there will rank like crazy because of the massive links the main page gets.
This is an unnecessarily extreme view unless you define what your limit of “SEO” and “adtech” is. Is me making quality content rather than garbage SEO? Am I “gaming the system” by using semantic HTML rather than a JavaScript monstrosity to display the content? Is it really an ad if I write about something I found agreeable?
No, they're negative players manifesting in these ways. The good-player version of both are incredibly simple. Producing good content that uses easy-to-find terminology. Putting yourself on directories (e.g. yellow pages), working conferences, handing out business cards, working with trade press, etc.
What concerns me more is when the search engines themselves are complicit in anti-user tactics.
One example is the loosening of restrictions, particularly by Google, around cloaking.
Google used to come down very hard on cloaking, where you show different content to a search engine's bot than you do to a visitor who arrives from a search engine.
The reason it used to disallow cloaking is because users hate it. Nobody wants to see a search result that appears to answer their query, only to find out when they arrive on the page that the content is inaccessible unless they pay for an expensive membership to the site.
But now Google indexes subscription and paywalled content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywall... and tries to make it seem like this isn't cloaking, but from a user's perspective, it totally is.