Looking for recent bad SEO / black hat example such as JC Penney example from 2011
-
I am giving a presentation in a few weeks and looking for a "what not to do" larger brand example that made poor SEO choices to try and game Google with black hat tactics. Any examples you can point me to?
-
An article we wrote a while ago with a few examples. It's my site but answers your question:
http://buildforsearch.com/googles-worst-penalties-and-what-happened/
-
Overstock offering discounts for edu links: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067445/The-Difference-Between-Black-Hat-SEO-and-Bad-SEO.
**From Article: "**Just this week, Overstock was penalized for extending discounts of up to 10 percent to universities/students/faculty who wrote posts that "happen to contain keywords in the anchor text of links." Not only is this against Google's guidelines, but it's also against the Federal Trade Commission's Guidelines; this link will take you to an article regarding a company which is helping with FTC disclosure issues."
-
You might like to take a look at this: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/27/interflora-disappears-from-google / http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-back-150366
-
It is not one company, but there is always the payday loan update where google targeted a whole industries. http://searchengineland.com/google-pay-day-loan-algorithm-google-search-algorithm-update-to-target-spammy-queries-162941
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
-
Is that trailing slashes necessity for an SEO doing blogs
Hi, I have a website, https://australiatimenow.com.au/ I would like to remove the trailing slash and move to .HTML formal. I have never done SEO on my articles. Is that, any issue causes if I move to .HTML format?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | joshnajenny0 -
What sort of knowledge differentiates a good SEO from a great SEO?
This is definitely more of a discussion than a clear cut answer.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Edward_Sturm0 -
Footer images links, good or bad?
Hi everybody! I have a very serius question because i have a problem with this. We run a website of voucher codes and we are looking that our rivals are putting their logos on footers of online stores with images, sometimes link to home, sometimes link to store within webpage. Should i ask for the same to online stores? I have scary to get a penalty by Google. Please help me with this and recommend me something because we are doing fair play but rivals are doing this and they get best results in SERPS. Thanks very much! Best regards!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pompero990 -
Wanna see Negative SEO?
One of my clients got hit with negative SEO in the past few days. Check it out in ahrefs. The site is www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any advice on what, if anything, I should do? Google disavow? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mrodriguez14401 -
Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept? If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag? If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
SEO expert advice needed :)
So I have a niche site that I'm pretty sure has received an over-optimization penalty. This was about nine months ago or so. I haven’t really done much with the site since however I’d like the site to start appearing in the serps again, as I am adding fresh content and trying to create a really useful resource. I don't appear in the serps for any keywords related to my niche anymore. The site IS still indexed though. I didn't get any messages telling me that I was penalized so I don't think it was manual. I didn't use any spam or anything like that but I believe the penalty was probably for anchor text over-optimization and/or too many links to non-home page urls in comparison to the total amount of links the site had. I know removing these links or changing the anchor can help but the thing is the site only has about 30 total linking root domains pointed at it. So I was wondering if I could just add more links to other pages/the home page and add more links with varied anchors/naked urls to change the ratios and make it appear more natural. Now, would/could this fix my penalty? I am frustrated that I even received a penalty at all because much of my competition is ranking for fairly competitive terms with no real solid links pointed at their site and tons of comment spam. I have some relevant links/quality links so I am hoping that fixing this penalty could help put me back where I was before I got knocked into oblivion. There is one example of a competitor with a PR0 site getting good traffic and ranking for some nice keywords with only a bunch of self-set up web properties (and some comment spam) containing one only page for the purpose of linking back to their money site (blogspot, wordpress, weebly, mywebstarts ect). On top of that a lot of the sites I'm competing again are MFA, garbage sites that are written by non-native English speakers that offer zero value to the visitor. I need to start out ranking these spammers again. What should I do? thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jmckiernan86_gmail.com0 -
Is this SEO correct?
Please view website http://www.staddonsbeds.co.uk. In the footer is the keywords the client is aiming for. These pages have been created separately to the sitemap. Is this tactic and pages white hat seo or is this considered black hat seo such as gateway pages? Could you please confirm Thanks Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | paulbaguley0 -
How many times should one submit the same article to various websites? 1 time? 10 times? What is okay to do with the most recent Panda update?'
For link-building purposes, seemingly it was okay to post the same article to multiple sites for links in the past. However, after the most recent Panda update our thought is that this may not be a good practice. So the question is, how many times is okay to submit an article for link building purposes. Should you always only submit to one site? Is it okay to do more than once? What is the right way to submit for link-building in Google's eyes? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Robertnweil10