Is this Negative SEO?
-
Hello Everyone,
I have just spent the past 9 months designing, engineering, and manufacturing our first product. We just opened our web store and started selling product. http://miveu.com. I have spent zero time doing any kind of SEO. We haven't even put up a sitemap yet or any redirects. I'm just now starting to take a look at things.
As soon as I start digging, I find that it appears that someone is at least attempting to do some kind of negative SEO against us. It seems to have started about a month ago. Check this out.
At first I was thinking this isn't so good, but it seems they are just trying to build crap content about our keywords and make it relevant to us. After taking a closer look, I'm thinking maybe this isn't all bad. They have targeted all of our exiting YouTube videos and created new videos that use all of our keywords, titles, people, etc in an effort to make our existing videos irrelevant. They have have also done the same thing with articles that were written about us, awards we have won as well as started negative campaigns about us and people who have said good things about us.
Here are my thoughts. While the content is really crappy, it seems like they are actually building keyword relevance to us and our products. They have all the right keywords, the content is just crappy. "There is no such thing as bad press". I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but I'm going to refer to their effort as "White-Hate SEO" because it doesn't appear to be a real dark effort.
Am I missing something here, am I way off base?
My bigger worry is that their campaign may include some much darker efforts that I just haven't found yet.
I'm pretty sure I know who is responsible for this. They have made it clear that they really do hate us. Frankly, I'm not interested in retaliation, I just want to get my own house in order with some good old-school whit-hat SEO. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks!
David -
Actually, I got the POV = Point of View OK, it was the Miveu = My View I struggled with a little.
Like Fransisco, I don't see any problem with the videos - other than some are not very good.
David, I think your product is really cool and I'd expect that a lot of your customers are going to be posting videos they have made with all kinds of keywords.
If I were going to market your idea, I'd have a blog on your site and embed some of the coolest YouTube videos that your customer make in some of the posts. A good blog that you update with really good stuff will be great for your SEO anyway.
This is a product you should be able to have great fun with!
-
LOL,,, the kid in the car used our product to make that video. It's all the ones under it that are in question.
Here is the resulting search without time filters.
-
I wouldn't worry about those videos. Just hire some 18 year-old skater to shoot a real video and bump these guys off the SERPS. I don't see anything negative about the videos. They are just boring. All I see is some dork recording his steering wheel racing a 4-cyclider Civic thinking it's fast. Don't loose sleep over this.
My 2 cents:
POV = Privately Owned Vehicle. Change the acronym in the logo so we aren't guessing watch POV means.
You'll get a high bounce rate from Android users like me!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Image upload SEO tips?
Is there anything I can do to my images other than naming them correctly to have with SEO? Size? File type? Maybe adding text on top of them to pick up OCR? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamesmcd030 -
Javascript and SEO
I've done a bit of reading and I'm having difficulty grasping it. Can someone explain it to me in simple language? What I've gotten so far: Javascript can block search engine bots from fully rendering your website. If bots are unable to render your website, it may not be able to see important content and discount these content from their index. To know if bots could render your site, check the following: Google Search Console Fetch and Render Turn off Javascript on your browser and see if there are any site elements shown or did some disappear Use an online tool Technical SEO Fetch and Render Screaming Frog's Rendered Page GTMetrix results: if it has a Defer parsing of Javascript as a recommendation, that means there are elements being blocked from rendering (???) Using our own site as an example, I ran our site through all the tests listed above. Results: Google Search Console: Rendered only the header image and text. Anything below wasn't rendered. The resources googlebot couldn't reach include Google Ad Services, Facebook, Twitter, Our Call Tracker and Sumo. All "Low" or blank severity. Turn off Javascript: Shows only the logo and navigation menu. Anything below didn't render/appear. Technical SEO Fetch and Render: Our page rendered fully on Googlebot and Googlebot Mobile. Screaming Frog: The Rendered Page tab is blank. It says 'No Data'. GTMetrix Results: Defer parsing of JavaScript was recommended. From all these results and across all the tools I used, how do I know what needs fixing? Some tests didn't render our site fully while some did. With varying results, I'm not sure where to from here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez1 -
Is SEO as Effective on AJAX Sites?
Hey Everyone, I had a potential client contact me about doing SEO for their site and I see that they have an AJAX site where all the content is rendered dynamically via AJAX. I've been doing SEO for years, but never had a client with an AJAX site. I did a little research and see how you can setup alternative pages (or snapshots as Google calls them) with the actual content so the pages are crawlable and will get indexed, but I'm wondering if that is as effective as optimizing static HTML pages or if Google treats AJAX page alternatives as less trustworthy/valuable. Also, does having the site in AJAX effect link building and social sharing? With the link structure, it seems there could be some issues with pointing links and passing link juice to internal pages Thanks! Kurt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kurt_Steinbrueck1 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Local SEO for Pregnancy Centers?
So, the thing is, we don't want these websites associated with anything pro-life or Christian. So, we can't list them in those directories. And we can't list them in abortion provider directories because they don't do abortions. The organizaitons are Christian, pro-life -- but the target audience is the complete opposite. How can I effectively market their services without crossing any boundaries?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CGR-Creative0 -
SEO for eCommerce?
I'm working on a game plan for the on-page optimization for a growing e-commerce site (https://www.boutine.com) and I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar projects. Specifically, how to get the most SEO value out of product and category pages. Thanks in advance! -Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boutine0 -
Are there any SEO Tips before killing a website?
Hey guys, My company acquired another company, and after a couple of months we decided to completely kill their website. I'm not finding any info about SEO best practices for this type of situation. From the "switching domains" and "new sites" articles and blog posts I can extrapolate that I should: 301 redirect their home page to ours Look at specific pages with good authority that relate to our pages and 301 them. Look at the strongest backlinks to their site and try to change them to point to our site. Create a 404 page for the rest of their webpages that tells them that we acquired the company (hopefully with a main menu and search bar) Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nrv0 -
Am I Doing This Wrong? Ecommerce SEO
I ran my site through the SEOMoz On-Page Optimization tool and one of the problems noted was "Keyword Self-Cannibalization" in this case, it was stating I was using the keyword "Board Games" too much. Site in question: http://theboardgamers.co.uk/ The problem being is that every product link contains the word "Board Game" - Which makes sense, but I guess it may look spammy to the SEO world. Would it be best to remove the "board game" part from each internal link and only leave it in the URL structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | REMOVE560