Negative SEO Attack on PissedConsumer and its Effects

[pissedconsumer]

Hi Guys,

PissedConsumer on its blog has posted an article today that would be of an interest for this community.
https://www.pissedconsumer.com/blog/2017/09/negative-seo-on-pissedconsumer-and-its-effects/

PissedConsumer talks about 2 examples of Negative SEO attacks. PissedConsumer was the subject of those attacks, therefore we are talking about our first hand experience and how we addressed it.

First attack: Use of 'bad keywords'.. sexual connotation while linking from a lot of hacked WordPress domains. Perpetrator of this attack, I assume, would have hoped to get pissedconsumer subdomain banned by google, due to artificial increase of links of Sexual Nature.

Second Attack: Use of spammed domains(domains that were previously banned by Google), with low trust and citation flows to '301 redirect' to pissedconsumer subdomain. This type of attack would be especially difficult to catch on without use of Majestic tools. Perpetrator of this Attack, I assume, was hoping to associate subdomain on PissedConsumer with 'spammy' neighborhood.

Both attacks, in reality, have failed as we show it in our analytics data. Our traffic have gone up during the attacks, and traffic only went down when we updated our disavow file on Google.

From this crowd, I am looking for advice... And I know you have a sense of humor... If you know the person/company who ordered and financed you assassination, you do not know the gunman(yet) that missed the shot... How would you respond?


If we know who ordered the attack, how shall http://www.pissedconsumer.com respond?

 

[Diamond Damien]

Our friends and BHW Enterprise members over at Pissed Consumer need your view on this. Suggestions, feedback and ideas all appreciated.

Have you had any experience of this type of attack? - BHW please chime in and give Pissed the benefit of your experience.

 

[nuf-ced]

Retaliate fight fire with fire. If you want some help doing it I'm sure we know a few guys who can help

 

[mudbutt]

Post a complaint on ripoffreport

 

[BassTrackerBoats]

That sort of attack has been shown to no longer have the same effect as it had in the past and you have hands on proof based on your analytics.
Google, as annoying as they can be when you are working as an SEO, is starting to move past allowing that out of the ordinary stuff affect rankings.

When a site gets a plethora of nonsensical links/anchors to their site in a quick manner it recognizes that there is no rhyme nor reason for it.

And, based on looking at your backlink and anchor text profile, you have zero to concern yourselves with. You are pretty strong there.

In addition to that, let them spend their resources to try and discredit you as it is probably a competitor losing out on building up their site/backlink profile by expending time and money on doing a piss poor job on trying to degrade yours.

 

[Wilson Grant Fisk]

You could always redirect any traffic you got to one of my porn sites

 

[Wilson Grant Fisk]

Also this might be a new method for unscrupulous BlackHat SEO'ers, post a ton of shit reviews for a company then offer them ORM services.
You should check the original complaints, see if they lead back to the SEO guys lol
Anyway, whoever they hired were obviously clowns.

 

[ScribScribScrib]

Also this might be a new method for unscrupulous BlackHat SEO'ers, post a ton of shit reviews for a company then offer them ORM services.
You should check the original complaints, see if they lead back to the SEO guys lol

wow dude thanks for the idea i got a few proxies laying around doing nothing, not gonna use it on OP's site ofc but still a very nice concept

 

[rafark]

Retaliate fight fire with fire. If you want some help doing it I'm sure we know a few guys who can help

While I don't think this is the wisest at all, especially for a public entity, how would they know who their real target is and avoid ending up screwing the innocent?

 

[Peter Ngo]

I would say just move on, neg SEO doesn't work anymore so better off focusing your time on growing your business than chasing the cat.

 

[Banned member 185991]

Do you guys have a easy to follow method to appeal reviews left against people or companies?

For example a ex-member of this forum (@nanexo) has created 5 fake reviews against myself which I have contacted your support over to try and get them removed and I got nowhere.

https://ste-hughes.pissedconsumer.com

If this was important to me how would I get it looked into (and hopefully removed) before thinking about NSEO? Maybe that's the first step in protecting yourselves from this.

You have a really powerful platform that people can use/have used to ruin people's reputations. I'm just surprised people have not done NSEO sooner. By virtue of your name if there is content on your website people/companies will want to hide it, it's not your typical review site where people leave positive reviews like Yelp/Google/trip advisor where a good ORM funnel can filter out negative responses or you can buy fake reviews to hide bad ones.

From my personal experience of trying to remove my obviously fake reviews I would either have to go with NSEO (quick and cheap) or spend months building out 20-30 web properties and ranking them above your site for my name (long and expensive). Perhaps adding in an appeal process will mean NSEO can be avoided?

But closer to the discussion I really love NSEO... Both of those methods of NSEO are pretty amateur hour. Porn sites rank on Google, the porn anchor method was the result of people talking online without testing to see if it actually worked. I've not seen this work, ever.

The 301 method used against you clearly didn't work either, and let's use our brains... Why would it? Why would Google waste crawler resources re-crawling domains removed from their index that they don't want to rank?

I would share a solid NSEO method but we don't normally allow discussion on NSEO so I'm not going to risk it, but the basic premise is make the website look bad/broken to bots.

They are also probably going to rank these pages higher on engines like Yahoo/Bing where spam still works which is not clever and defeats the purpose. Who ever is doing these attacks is pretty dense.

What do I think you should do? Nothing.

Google don't care, they probably get 500k web masters crying to them everyday.

Call the FBI?... How would that work?

"Guys I know you're catching international drug smugglers, terrorists and money launderers but someone has hacked the Fed Ex WordPress website"...

If you 301 them back you will remove the URL they tried to hit from Google, making them successful and the 301 method used on you didn't work so why would it work if you 301 a link back to them?

You can't prove who did it so how could you sue them.

It's interesting though. Are you tracking ranks on these sub domains? Ultimately the companies want to drop these reviews into page 2 or 3 so if you're measuring their NSEO success by monitoring traffic you're really doing it wrong, that traffic could be anything really.

Shall I set up some serpbook public links so we can all see the effects of these methods over the next few weeks?

 

[Sherb]

@pissedconsumer, what you are failing to realize is that it likely was not the companies who have the complaints outstanding that called for the negative SEO attack. What probably happened was they reached out to a shadier online reputation manager to attempt to fix their online reputation. The ORM service provider suggested a way to deindex the Pissed Consumer links, and the company, not knowing the semantics of negative SEO, was all for it for a slightly increased charge.

As @Ste Fishkin alluded to, things such as this probably would not affect your website if you had a clearer, more visible method of dispute resolution for business owners, instead of forcing them to pay $1,200 before you'd even consider rectifying a negative review: https://www.pissedconsumer.com/static/legitimacy-verification-program-rules-and-conditions.html

Most of my business as a reputation management professional comes from people extremely concerned about how pages from sites such as Pissed Consumer, Ripoff Report, etc rank highly for their business search terms. So thanks for all the clients, but at the same time, your business concept is predatory to small, local businesses when you cater to the unhappy.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Also this might be a new method for unscrupulous BlackHat SEO'ers, post a ton of shit reviews for a company then offer them ORM services.
You should check the original complaints, see if they lead back to the SEO guys lol
Anyway, whoever they hired were obviously clowns.

Nails on the road 500 yards before a gas station. Ah the good ol days.

 

[t0mmy]

Ste is spot on, it's surprising you haven't had this happen already or worse.

nanexo did the same retarded shit on myself and others here, cleaning up his mess is still an ongoing process. Your site is similar to the scumbags at rippoffreport - you allow people to post freely defaming other companies with zero proof of said accusations, potentially destroying or at least costing the company money.

Just like ROR you make it impossible for innocent parties to get the nonsense removed, even charging them.. such a low bullshit business model. I have zero sympathy for you.

In terms of the Neg SEO comments.. there is a very simple way and it doesn't cost a lot - knock a site offline for long enough and it'll soon lose its rankings. Not something I'd do myself, but it certainly works and isn't rocket science.

 

[mickyfu]

If I believed in Karma it would be what I call Karma. Sadly I don't, so we will just say you reap what you sow.

 

[Banned member 185991]

Nice find @Sherbert Hoover. Mind blown.

In terms of the Neg SEO comments.. there is a very simple way and it doesn't cost a lot - knock a site offline for long enough and it'll soon lose its rankings. Not something I'd do myself, but it certainly works and isn't rocket science.

This works but is illegal and a lot of sites now run cloudflare which would stop this.

 

[Deleted member 720373]

instead of forcing them to pay $1,200 before you'd even consider rectifying a negative review:

I couldn't believe I even read this.

Not that I doubted you @Sherbert Hoover but I had to check it myself and it's there in black and white!!!

Zero respect, zero sympathy and zero fucks given.

I'm surprised your site hasn't been attacked before.

 

[Unreliable Witness]

You're accusing two companies of NSEO without any proof. You just have suspicion.

If their sites were to suffer from any degradation of ranking, their lawyers would have a field day now that you have shown intent to harm on a public forum.

Both this post and your blog post could be libellous, even if nothing happens to their websites. After all, you are accusing them of doing something that they may not have done, and hurting their reputation.

But isn't that what your website does anyway? Allow negative reviews to harm businesses without any evidence of wrongdoing.

If you want an SEO solution, remove the subdomains. Google shouldn't recognise links to a page that doesn't exist.

Then get on with creating an ethical business.

 

[mickyfu]

I couldn't believe I even read this.

Not that I doubted you @Sherbert Hoover but I had to check it myself and it's there in black and white!!!

Zero respect, zero sympathy and zero fucks given.

I'm surprised your site hasn't been attacked before.

Where I come from it is know as extortion. Maybe somebody should contact the FBI.

 

[Deleted member 720373]

Where I come from it is know as extortion. Maybe somebody should contact the FBI.

Extortion, blackmail! Take your pick.

I was under the impression both were illegal.