Did Google Just Gave Us An Offensive Weapon?

bfellow

bfellow

Regular Member
Joined
Jan 3, 2008
Messages
322
Reaction score
374
Hey Black Hatters,

Google just have us an early Christmas gift. First the link:

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/google-updates-rankings-to-penalize-negative-reviews.html

The idea is Google is going to penalize websites that get negative reviews on review sites. Google must be sipping the Kool-Aid to be letting something like this happen.

It used to be that we had no offensive weapons in the toolbox. Backlinks don't hurt, so you couldn't backlink someone into bad neighborhoods to bring them down or anything link that.

But this. Jesus Christ. Either by automating the postings, hiring the postings out at $.10 a whack on Mechanical Turk, or what ever, you could systematically spread around nasty reviews on a competitor. A net loss to a competitor is a net gain to you cause something has to fill the void, might as well be your website right. :)

I wanted to hear others opinions on this one. I think Google is flat out nuts. They will obviously have a way to detect 100,000 messages in 24 hours popping up, but a service like MT slowly shitting them out over time, with completely different wording. No way Big G can detect this at all.

What do you all think?
 
Advertise on BHW
I guess that's a double edged sword... It's good on the one hand to take out your competition and what if you already dominate a niche people will be coming for you with bad reviews...

Google is nuts...
 
It's the most obviously-stupid thing G has done in a while.

But I was thinking more along the lines of flooding the net with positive reviews for my sites. That way, there won't be the potential of a backfire when G quietly reverses itself and goes ahead and counts the links as always.
 
To be honest I don't believe the entire story. I also don't believe that Google would take the step to penalize sites just because of bad reviews. Can you imagine how far your competition would take this? Websites would be getting negative reviews for nothing and just to be pushed out by the enemy.

We'll see what happens but I still don't believe it.
 
They could just buy getsatisfaction and integrate every site's score into their own ranking algorithm. Then again, we'd still be able to spam the shit out of our competitors.
 
@Donnie Darko

I will give you there is a lot of debate around this issue. It was Cutt's himself who came out and said a backlink won't hurt you, but spammy links won't help you. The idea being you couldn't spam your competitor off the planet.

The negative review thing though in my mind is just plain crazy and not well thought out at all.
 
To be honest with you, I think Matt Cutts is full of BS half the time. I've SEEN aged websites drop from 1st place to the 5th, 6th pages in a VERY short amount of time, only because of precise hacklinking attacks.

But yes, I do agree with you that this whole review thing is crazy.

bfellow said:
@Donnie Darko

I will give you there is a lot of debate around this issue. It was Cutt's himself who came out and said a backlink won't hurt you, but spammy links won't help you. The idea being you couldn't spam your competitor off the planet.

The negative review thing though in my mind is just plain crazy and not well thought out at all.
Click to expand...
 
Meh, all the more reason to have well paid goons at your disposal.
 
I guess Google is smart enough to create an algorithm to take care about this. Do you really think they will take down any business for fake negative reviews?
 
"Don't spam review sites either, because if detecting review spam isn't already part of the algorithm adjustment, it likely will be soon."

At least they're acknowledging the possible backlash here...
 
Donnie Darko said:
To be honest with you, I think Matt Cutts is full of BS half the time.
Click to expand...
I think you're giving him too much credit to say it's only BS "half" the time.

I take everything he says with multiple mines-full of salt.
 
Donnie Darko said:
To be honest with you, I think Matt Cutts is full of BS half the time. I've SEEN aged websites drop from 1st place to the 5th, 6th pages in a VERY short amount of time, only because of precise hacklinking attacks.

But yes, I do agree with you that this whole review thing is crazy.
Click to expand...

I'll give you $50,000 to take my two main competitors down
 
So now there are gonna be millions of review sites. LOL
 
I'm sure google people had some deep thoughts about this, and maybe a given amount of bad reviews will trigger some sort of audit of the website, as opposed to direct negative serp or something like that.

Seems fairer, but still bad for any black-hatter.
 
how could this be true, it just does fit any logic
 
complete complete complete 100% BS

you can do about 5 minutes of detective work and find out that the whole "companies with bad reviews don't get listed" is complete BS - I'd post info that shows this here, however then I'd be outing a few sites that are making some people a healthy amount of profit :)
 
The author of that report sensationalized things a bit - Big G just isn't counting negative reviews as positive link juice anymore, they're not penalizing the site directly.
 
good time, this was even on CNN, and showed the reasons why...

Used to be, bad reviews helped you..there goes one of my tricks...
 
Advertise on BHW
You must log in or register to reply here.
Sign up now!

Main Menu

Home Main Forum List Black Hat SEO White Hat SEO BHW Newbie Guide Blogging Black Hat Tools Social Media Downloads

Marketplace

Account Selling Content / Copywriting EBooks / Methods Hosting Misc Proxies For Sale SEO - Link building SEO - Packages Social Media Social Media - Panels Web Design More

Making Money

Affiliate Programs Hire a Freelancer IM Journeys Making Money Pay Per Click Site Flipping Want to Buy

BlackHat World

Dispute Resolution Forum Suggestions & Feedback Introductions Lounge
Back
Top