After seeing some very “spammy” referral links to a recent post re-exposing an ill-tempered script kiddie, and other interesting traffic in my logs, I noticed that the post in question dropped like a rock off Google search results for terms it should hit on.  Notice here how even searching for the title of the post will turn up links to it, but not the post itself.  I’ve noticed this phenomenon once before on this site, with another post.  Smart and avid readers of this blog probably already have some theories about who’s responsible, and what’s going on ;-)

Edit (Sun Sep  7 12:22:02 CDT 2008): As of this particular moment, the page seems to have reappeared on Google’s search.  Not sure why (glitch in the matrix), or for how long.  I’m going to leave this post up, though, as the topic is still very interesting.

Edit (Thu Sep 11 19:12:31 CDT 2008): Annnd now it’s back down, hard.

I’m definitely no SEO expert, and certainly not anywhere near an expert on the more arcane aspects of negative or blackhat SEO.  I did, however, have a good time reading about a tactic that some call “Google Bowling”.  The term makes it sound like a lot of fun, and I imagine it is–for the people taking part in it.  Here’s some links:

• Google Bowling - Can We Fight it?
• Google Should Offer Self-Defense Against Spammy Inbound Links

The idea here is: by creating links to a page on sites that are blatantly “spammy” and subject to a very negative weight by a search engine’s ranking algorithms (in this case, Google’s), the ranking of the target page can be dragged down, or, apparently delisted completely.  A little poking around in search results for “Google Bowling” reveals several groups that will do this for you, for a fee.  I doubt that the perpetrator in this case has the resources and skill to pull this off on his own, so I certainly hope it was worth whatever he paid :-).

This isn’t really the site you want to go for, regarding SEO information, and it’s little more than a curiosity when it happens to isolated posts on a blog, but it’s definitely something you might be interested in when it’s your organization being seriously targeted by a competitor that implements these tactics.  It’s difficult to see it happening, except for an occasional referer from a spam site.  The negative sites linking to you are almost certainly such SEO black holes that you won’t be able to find them reliably using Google.  It’s also difficult to figure out who’s responsible, unless the answer presents itself in the pages that have been “bowled”, as it has in this case.

The only real defense, from what I’ve read, is to minimize the impact of negative links by overwhelming them with positive links.  This is pretty easy for larger sites, and makes the cost of “bowling” pages on those sites quite a bit higher.  Smaller blogs, like this one, that average a few good incoming links per post are much more vulnerable.  In this particular case, I’m grateful to the guys at (the larger-than-this-site) attrition.org, who have kindly mirrored the Yousif Yalda posts on this site in their extremely informative and entertaining Charlatans pages.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 5:38 pm and is filed under web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.