Brand Name Cratering - possible N-SEO or Black Hat Attacks

[SBIM-Jake]

Ryan & Dirk,

Why appreciate the thought, it is way off base for the specific topic.  And I would not normally challenge an opinion (when someone is trying to help) but I would hate for users who see this post in the future to thinks "Flash is bad," "Flash can be blamed for almost any ranking problem."

The client is not using some "old" website that they/we just  lazily neglected.  It is newer Moto-CMS technology which we chose to replace their Wordpress template with, in Dec. 2013.  We use flash websites all over the world (not talking about this client) and have no problem getting them ranked (and maintaining ranking) for brand names with Baidu, Yandex, Google & Bing.  Is it as easy to do as with a normal HTML website?  No.  But, if you do things like everyone else does in life, you can only expect to have the same level of success/failure as the sheep you followed.  If you know what you are doing Flash ranks fine, and can provide a better user experience for many users.

Ryan's initial point about "Clear Channel communication's rankings" makes some sense.  And we have observed this with other properties, to a much lesser degree.  However, the timeline of the ROR hoax report, these bad European root domain links that showed up (we have since now found 20, and growing), along with the fact that if you search for "Brand Name Contact Us" their Contact Us page is nowhere to be found (which does not occur in the Clear Channel  comparison), cannot just be blamed on coincidence when all started happening within 8 days of each other.

I truly hope that we can find out exactly what is going on; not just for our client, but, because I want to be able to lay the blue-print out here for the rest of the MOZ community.  As maybe it will help other small businesses from having to go though the same thing.

Jake

[SBIM-Jake]

Community:

I also found another interesting data point today:  when you Google Search the company brand name now, the big organic "Google badge" no longer shows up on the right side of the page (and I verified with several different U.S. IPs). But when you search like this "Brand Name LLC" the organic Google badge shows up.  This is also a fairly new phenomenon (last time I checked it was around Thanksgiving).  And it is very unfortunate as only 5% of consumers include "LLC" when searching for the company name.

Something changed drastically in December.  What caused it? The awesome, big press release (optimizing the brand name in the far left of the Press Release headline).  The optimized ROR hoax report.  Fake bad root-domains from Europe (coming slowly but surely).  I feel like this ugly beast is going to show her face soon  (hopefully I won't go blind)  

[DirkC]

Jake,

Personally, I am convinced that Flash is not the optimal technology to build websites, and I am not the only one have this opinion, but as you point out that's besides the question.

However, if you want to use Flash, you'll have to do it properly, both for SEO and for your users. This is not a question of following the sheep, or some biased opinion of a bunch of flash haters, it is a fact.

For your users: each time have opened the site - it took an extremely long time to load - and I ended op with a page showing only the navigation in the middle. This can also be seen on the load video I inserted from Webpagetest that you can check here.

For SEO:

• Flash can be indexed (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/72746?hl=en#1) - however you block robots to index any .sw* file.

• You serve different content to robots & human users - that's called literally the definition of cloaking, and is considered a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines. See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en : "Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URL's to human users and search engines". The url's indexed in Google are static HTML pages which in normal conditions are never seen by your visitors and they are different from the url's you serve to human users.

• as mentioned in my previous remark - you also block the indexing of .js files - where google clearly states that this can have an impact of your rankings.

If you would hate that somebody would think "Flash is bad" based on this post, I consider it a scary thought if future readers of this post would think that it's ok to completely ignore the Google Webmaster Guidelines just because you seem to get away with it (until now).

If you are convinced that this drop is caused by negative SEO, you are free to do so. Maybe there is a correlation between the sudden drop & the events you describe. The truth is out there...

But, there is plenty that you can do on your own site to improve your ranking and defend yourself against the effect of any negative SEO attempt.

rgds,

Dirk

[RyanPurkey]

Jake, I wouldn't rely on Google's presentation of the one-box bio and map in the search results as a yes or no indicator of negative SEO. I just ran the search for the company name (no quotes; lowercase; without the LLC) and got the box... I also wouldn't use the ability to rank a company homepage for the company brand name searches as indicator of ranking strength.  With consistent NAP, domain registration, and registration via GWT most any web software--flash, html, php, asp, whatever--that simply loads should do the same within a short time frame after launch.

I also get the companies contact us page when running a search as you described.

This means so far the only consistent thing to note is that Google's display of the company search is similar to how it handles other company searches (not an N-SEO indicator) and the use of flash on the site is in conflict with recommendations Google has made public, and made public shortly prior to some of the changes you've seen. (Late 2014).  Correcting those on your site would be beneficial.

As for the ROR, yes those are annoying!  Hopefully with more positive press and presence on high strength domains (Hoovers, et al, mentioned earlier) you can get it so far from the front page as to make no impact. The disavow tool remains an option for the links you've been getting from suspect domains.  In the meantime, change what you have ready access to (the issues Dirk mentioned) to ensure that's not a part of the larger picture. Best of luck!

[SBIM-Jake]

Dirk,

With all due respect, it is a little presumptuous for you to assume we did non't know any of the things you lectured us on the first time.  For you to do it a second time was really unnesssary.

Our client made a conscience decision to install this type of website.  They knew all of the potential pitfallls beforehand, and this is what they wanted.  And personally I think they made a good decision.  They are in the traditional media world and it paid for them to be different. The site works good for them, and they get a lot of compliments for it.  They also get some people who don't like it, but who cares (mainly mobile users; but mobile users are bad leads for their business segment).

We remain committed to helping them find out what is going on.  Within 5 days of the original ROR hoax report being filed they were contacted aggressively by 2 different Internet Mafia companies (Reputation Management).  If you combine the timeline of events with the various drop in rankings there was to much smoke in the direct area not to attribute the smoke to the fire which happened in the same area.

Their site has lots of things that can be improved (like most business operations), and if the client gives us the budget to do it, we will.  But until then we are going to focus on the smoke and fire that happened in the same time and place.

Jake

[SBIM-Jake]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the thoughts.

We agree that organic Google Badge has little to do with what happened.  It was just another interesting data point, which I did not expect to find.  As far as the search results you are getting, that is bizarre.  We and the client have been conducting searches every day, all across the U.S.  And in no screenshots we have been sent the last 6 weeks has anyone found the page you are talking about (but nobody has reported about the organic Google badge as I just noticed it today).

As far as these rash of bad links that are coming in since December, you can only disavow them once you find them. And by the time you find them they usually have already done some damage.  So if someone is working on a shrewd N-SEO campaign, they are going to continue building them via the follow the "slow and steady" build model. (which I read about on a Black Hat forum). And since this client has been coincidentally been called by 2 different Internet Mafia companies, we have to follow the smoke.

Thanks again for all your thoughts.  I truly appreciate it.  We will update the community if/when we figure out exactly what happened.

Good luck with your business in 2015.

Jake

[DirkC]

Jake,

I truly apologise for trying to help you...

If you are knowingly violating Google Webmaster Guidelines, you are just waiting for accidents to happen. If I was working for a sneaky reputation management firm, I would just file a spam report at Google (for the cloaking). The other stuff (lousy links, fake customer reports,...) would just be the cream on the cake to reinforce the initial claim. This would probably enough to generate the issues you experience now.

Please continue to focus on the smoke, but unless you turn off the gas, the fire will continue to burn.

Dirk

[Dr-Pete]

My gut feeling is that this is very unlikely to be negative SEO. Frankly, it's still very rare, and most cases that are assumed to be negative SEO turn out to be much more complicated. One oddity here is that I'm not seeing a clear penalty-like scenario. You're talking about a very specific case of multiple pages showing up for a single query. This could be as simple as Google tweaking their domain crowding settings. I see this frequently - one day, a single domain will get multiple listings; the next day it will get one. If you look at thousands of SERPs, this actually happens every day.

This could indicate Google saw a change in your signals or signals related to your brand name, but it's unlikely to be due to negative SEO. It's also, honestly, not a huge issue, for the most part. You still rank #1 for your brand, and your brand is just one query. If Google has decided to not show multiple pages from your domain, this may be beyond your control and have little or nothing to do with your SEO efforts.

I do also share Dirk's concerns. A lot of the internal pages are being cached with very little text - Google is indexing them, but the text-only content is showing up as just a few menu items. These pages are going to look thin, and they may be running into some quality problems. This could cause them to compete with each other and fall out of some rankings. While Flash can be used successfully, the implementation here is part of the problem. The load times could also be causing you some issues. At best, it's creating obstacles.

At first glance, your link profile also looks pretty weak. You have a ton of free PR sites and web directories. In small quantities, these are fine, but when they make up a huge swath of your profile, you're getting into danger territory. When I see things like "free link directory" over and over, I start to worry. Add that to technical and on-page problems, and now you're compounding the issues.

I'm also seeing that some of the "links" are actually 301-redirects from a very long, exact-match domain, that you've redirected to the site entirely. I'm seeing a number of serious quality issues in your link profile, to be brutally honest.

I don't think the problems here have anything to do with the competition. I think you have to take a good, hard look at both the technical state of the site, the overall content quality, and the overuse of low-quality link tactics.

[RyanPurkey]

Hearty thumbs up to Dr. Pete's (and Dirk's) analysis here.

Jake, you might not like the conclusions but their leaps and bounds better than what you'd find from most other sources. Please heed their advice.

[SBIM-Jake]

Dr. Meyers,

Thank you for the response.

You seem to have pointed out several things which actually make my argument stronger.  As stated in our first post, we are not an SEO company and our client does not perform SEO on their own (they have no marketing employees working for them directly). Therefore, if you are stating that their are a bunch of "bad/spammy 301 redirects" and "bad free directory links" coming to the website then you just confirmed that it was in fact done as part of a negative SEO campaign.  This is what I have been trying to point out all along.

In regards to their being a bunch of "thin content on the website," this is correct.  However, it has nothing to do with this timeline or the specific problem we are trying to solve.  On January 7th the client asked us to add a massive amount of new local market pages to the website. The pages have nothing to do with SEO, they are totally for user benefit (and they are working as PPC conversion rates have gone up 60% since the partial addition).  And as this massive page project was transpiring it did create some thin/duplicate content.  Does it have even 1% to do with the problem that transpired in early December?  Nope.  Forget my opinion, based on hard-facts it is not possible.

I know sometimes it is easy for smart people (and I mean this as a compliment) to get off track and point out "holes everywhere they see them."  This truck has rust in spots, a tail-light out, a crack in the windshield, some stains in the carpet, the rear-end housing drips grease, and the engine idles rough.. But we took it in to the mechanic shop because on a specific date the transmission started slipping.  And at this point in time our client has ordered us to specifically find out why the transmission started slipping in early December.  We are aware of all the other small problems with the car before we took it into the shop.  But the client is only paying us to work on one specific problem.  The facts (timeline) show that the client towed a 20,000 pound trailer behind this truck the first week in December. Yet the truck is only rated to tow 7,000 pounds.  So we are going to focus on what we were told to fix, and what the facts point to.

All this being said, this company received a hoax ROR report in early December. They were contacted (and still are) by Internet Mafia companies. They have numerous bad links and 301 redirects pointing to the website, which they nor we created (many of them appear to be years old though) They continue to get brand new spam links pointed to specific pages on this website every week (many are coming from down servers in Europe).  All of these things have caused specific pages on this website to be suppressed.  This is what I would like to stay laser focused on, and try to resolve. Sure can we issue a "disallow file" for a bunch of the spam/crappy links?  Yes.  But that won't fix the problem with the new links being added every week which we can't find until months after they have been added, and have already caused ranking damage.

We need to find a solution to locate these new spam links as soon as they get posted, but before Google penalizes the website for them.  While we love MOZ, it is not the tool for this (as it might never find bad/spammy links, let alone in 1-2 days).  We are hoping that someone in the MOZ community knows of a tool we can use to help our client find and eradicate these new links as they are going up.  My guess is that once they do we will see these missing pages start to reappear.

Thanks

Jake

[SBIM-Jake]

Hi Ryan,

It appears to me that Dr. Meyers just confirmed this is a N-SEO attack.

Hopefully he or someone else can help us find a tool to quickly find these new bad/spammy links before GWT's find them.  If we can remove them almost as fast as they go up, hopefully the person running this attack will lose interest and move on to easier prey.

Jake

[Dr-Pete]

Here's the problem - these things never happen in isolation. Technical problems, a weak link profile, possible negative SEO - they all compound each other. If this site had a strong historical link profile, throwing a few dozen (or even a few hundred) bad links at it wouldn't have an impact. Big sites can absorb that. The problem here is that the entire link profile looks too much like spam. Now, add in technical issues, and you're just crippling your efforts all around.

Neither of us can prove where the links came from, but it is my strong gut feeling that these links look a lot more like something a past SEO company or past employee would've done than any attacker. They're not blatantly bad - they're just uniformly low quality. The bad redirects looks like exactly something a company that moved sites would do - not an attacker. I think you need to dig deep, because either someone isn't telling you something, or someone just doesn't know. It's amazing how often past efforts never get documents or just disappear.

Majestic will index the links a bit faster than us, but nothing will do it as soon as they get posted. Right now, if this is entirely negative SEO, your only tools are disavow and legal action.

It is my sincere belief, though, that there are many fundamentals missing that could shield your site, and that you're going to end up chasing a problem that doesn't exist and wasting a lot of time and money.

[SBIM-Jake]

This post is deleted!

[Dr-Pete]

If you are fighting a war, I'm not sure you'll win this war this particular way. There is not tool (including Google) that can give you link data in real-time (or even in a couple of days), so you'll end up acting late and always in a reactionary way. You'll have to cut as you go, and you'll always be a step behind, if they keep up the attack.

Google will often discount these links over time (unfortunately, it just takes them time to catch up), but your client's efforts may be better spent building a stronger link profile that can withstand attacks like this, even if it means some short-term pain. Otherwise, I fear this is a battle you'll keep fighting for months.

Unfortunately, the keyword-heavy brand name makes life a little tougher, because Google is more likely to see branded anchor text as suspicious (as opposed to having a brand name that isn't a general search term, like "Moz"). It may help to make sure the client's brand is strongly established in social channels and other profiles (including Google+). Let Google know this is associated with a brand, and you're not just keyword-stuffing (which may be how it appears to them, because of these targeted links).

[SBIM-Jake]

Hi Dr. Meyers,

Thanks again for the thoughtful answers.

I wanted to share our final findings about this matter with the rest of the community.  It turns out that our client did face a pretty brutal N-SEO attack.  They were targeted with over 300 bad links (and still counting) in a period of 3.5 months. The links were targeted at sections of the brand name in an effort to confuse Google, and cause damage to brand name in search results.  As a result several pages of the website are still gone from the search results (in relation to brand name searches).  And this causes a fake ROR report to continue showing at the top of the search results when you search for our client's brand name (and someone also has built positive links to this ROR report).

The final question to be answered was this:  what should be done about it?  Dr. Meyers was right that this is not a war that our client could win.  The only thing the client could try was to "build up the positive link profile to counter the bad links." Unfortunately, our client does not believe in chasing Google's algo changes around.  Therefore they won't spend money on link building strategies (and I don't disagree with this).

During this process I learned a lot about N-SEO and the various types of people involved in it.  And it is not "very rare" like Google or the "just keep creating quality content" crowd want everyone to believe.  Here is very good (and I believe well researched) article about what is actually going on: web master world. com/ google/4677866. htm  And while we did not experience this N-SEO technique, here was a very good article on link injection: site olytics. com / black-hat-seo-technique-demystified/

Bottom line:  your average local small plumbing business, tire store, landscape company, etc., can be easily decimated in the search rankings in 2-4 weeks. And do most small companies like that have the resources to pay someone to start building positive link profiles to try and counter the attack?  The answer for most small businesses is No.

Our client seems to think that the only way to really counter this garbage is force Google to do the right thing, via legislation. By the "right thing" he means this:  giving all companies on the Internet a "Bill of Rights" for their virtual storefront.  One of the Rights should be that the small business can determine what geography can be allowed to impact their search results.  99% of small businesses in the United States don't sell anything internationally.  Why should they then be penalized because someone posts garbage links on penalized servers in Europe, China, Mexico, etc.?  If they set their Webmaster Tools geo-target to "Illinois" or the "United States" then only links from servers in those areas should be allowed to affect their rankings (positive or negative).  Furthermore, if someone does find a way to institute a N-SEO attack from within the United States against your brand you would then have legal recourse to immediately do something about it.  It would not even require most small businesses to file a TRO/lawsuit/injunction. Most of it could be handled directly with the handful of U.S. hosting companies.  Would this idea stop all N-Seo attacks?  Of course not. But the situation would at least be manageable in your own country.  Furthermore, I think it would take the wind out of the sails of many N-SEO people if much of their cheap foreign labor was rendered useless (as U.S. hosting companies could be required to block foreign IPs that are caught posting garbage more than 1 time).  I think the reason a lot of people employee N-SEO people now is because it is easy, and they can't get caught. Make it more difficult and only the hardened criminals are going to continue with it.

Our client has no resolution, but hopefully something in here helps a small business out there.

Jake