Negative Stuff - Post Edit

[Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants]

Is google to blame?  I feel like something of this magnitude requires legal action but havent found anything online about what I can do legally, whether I should collaborate and if simply bringing all this to google's attention is enough.

Thanks

[EGOL]

I would hire someone who really knows their stuff about Penguin and Panda.... and has lots of experience getting penalized sites restored in the SERPs.   That person might know what can be done about your situation.

It might not cost as much as you think

[seoagnostic]

I'll be honest. I run a legal site and it is large and one of the oldest online. Despite the fact that it would be an incredible shame for it to disappear and not be updated thanks to the miserable way Panda and Penguin are dealing with it, I don't think Google cares about this issue that concerns a minority of sites and that there is no avenue for us to practically do anything. Nor do I think people will revolt, despite the fact they like me and our honest and very helpful site a whole lot. This is because most will get something similar elsewhere, say "oh, that's really a shame what Google is doing to them" if they even realize what's going on (and they don't except a few people here) and go on their way.

Our junk competitors have caught up with us and surpassed us in some respects solely because we've been dealing with Google issues that should not exist since Panda 2.2. All the advice made no difference and still we're dealing with people saying what it "might" be but nobody sees any huge issue that would take down our site. It's incredibly painful but Google collects Adsense revenue whether it's us or someone else. Until they get hit in the pocket or someone else takes them on in the search engine business, you're better off focusing on fixing the problem - if it's at all possible - or just accepting that life isn't fair, this completely sucks and you'll have to find something else to do. How bad can it get? 18 years after our first true "website" Google has given all of our content a page rank of zero - yes zero. This has gone on for weeks. We'd get better results scraping our own content!

[seoagnostic]

I can tell you (I have significant legal experience) that chances are you will need to spend huge sums of money trying to prove your slimy competitor libeled you. Libel cases are the most difficult to make and you will almost certainly need to put the money up front to fund your own lawsuit. So let's answer this question - how will you be able to identify who put up all those bad links to cause your negative SEO? Send information subpoenas to every site, hoping that they have IP address info for every bad link that was posted? This is why slimy companies will do this - very difficult if not impossible to prove and the money taking you down is worth the investment and price of doing business. It's tough and dirty. Perhaps best to worry just about keeping clean.

[seoagnostic]

Regarding the issue of bounce - I will only say that IMHO Google may severely penalize you for what you let it see (Analytics, Adsense, etc.) I've always wondered whether having bots thrown at your site that would increase bounce rate would affect a site. Call it paranoia but my data seemed to indicate that the less Google knew the better this site did. Nobody would know how Google really takes into account except Google. Almost everything else is our speculation. Good luck, truly.

[seoagnostic]

I'm suffering from a similar problem such as you. My first site was up back when people didn't know what a search engine was. There are a couple of things I'm noticing that give me cause for concern based upon SEO people researching my links and coming to the same (and wrong) conclusion.

Frequently these SEO experts would check backlinks, see domains that had pages that looked like extremely poor. Cheap looking design, missing images, sometimes with long blogrolls too, etc. They told me I was getting significantly downgraded because of these spam pages from my obvious link campaign. After review, I realized that all the links were legitimate (we didn't do a link campaign.) The sites they spotted had pages that probably weren't changed in at least a decade, similar to that geocities look. Blogrolls were really popular many years prior to anyone even knowing what a nofollow link is. I'm wondering whether I'm getting penalized by Google as a result of these because I can't find any reason for our severe penalty and you're suffering from the same.

One other item - those with the gold will make the rules and get content placed everywhere, obviously for a payment behind the scenes. Large SEO shops are selling these placements and there seems to be little the small to mid sized websites can do to maintain their position before the domino effect kicks in. I'm wondering whether you need to increase backlinks to at least remain in the game.  Wishing you the best of luck.

[EGOL]

When you are in a high volume area there is going to be a lot of scraping, spinning and mash-ups.  Lots of sites get millions of links from this type of activity.  It's not negative SEO... its just script kiddies flexing their skills.

So, before you point the finger at the "white knight" are you sure that you don't have a Panda problem caused by thin content or duplicate content. Are you sure that you are not bouncing visitors and that is the root of your problem?

If you are getting hit by link spam your rankings drops are likely to occur on dates where lots of other people get hit by Pengin problems.  Did you get an unnatural link warning in webmaster tools?

I hear your concerns but am not convinced that you have a link spammer hitting you.

What have you done to rule out the more likely situation that the problem is not caused by a saboteur?