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
-
A semi client of mine reached out to me recently that another site scraped his whole site and traffic dropped significantly.
Someone that reaches out to me on occasion for help but is mostly an SEO DIYer recently had his site copied completely and his traffic dropped significantly immediately after. I have never had a client experience this in the past. Does anyone have suggestions or expertise on this? See his question and what he has done below. Jeremy This site scraped my credit site. Its appearance coincides with a dramatic sitewide decrease in Google traffic.I submitted a takedown request by paying this company $200. No results yet. My hosting company also placed blocks on the site HTML which pings my server for CSS and picture files. My Google Webmaster tools account shows inbound links coming from the copycat. Is there something more I should be doing? Copy Site: http://masqueros.com/Real Site: https://www.savvyoncredit.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
New Service/Product SEO and rankings
Hello, fellow MOZers. We are a web design company, and we had SEO as secondary service for years. Due to changes in the company we started pushing SEO as one of our main services about 6 monhs ago. We have separate page , targeting that service, as well as case studies, supportive information pages, even SEO Center, which is like a blog about SEO only. We are not using black hat SEO, doing honest link earning and building, don't use keyword stuffing, everything is by the book. I understand that SEO takes time, especially for a company which has a footprint as web design company, not as SEO company. We are ranking very good for web design related keyphrases, however, we don't see any improvements for SEO related keywords. It always was and is between 25-30 SERP. At the same time, competitors, who are ranking on first page for SEO related phrases are pretty bad looking. Design-wise as well as blackhat-SEO-wise. Everything is keyword stuffed, UX is horrible, prices are ridiculous. So, do you guys have any thought/advise on how we can see results / why we are not seeing results. Links: Google search result: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=seo%20houston Competitors: www.seohouston.com, www.graphicsbycindy.com Our pages: https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston.php, https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Domain.com/XXX or domain.com/blog/XXX ?
i have a business and a side blog on the website. is it fine to turn my blog to domain.com/XXX instead of domain.com/blog/XXX? does it in anyway of these affect the SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Does this graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit?
Hello,Does the attached graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit? Keep in mind that on our eCommerce site most purchases are from return customers. I forgot to add here that we cut a bunch of paid links in May 2013 as well. We quit cutting paid links when our rankings dropped - we thought it was the paid links. We currently have 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was on May 22. ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Local SEO
My website was ranked on top of all keywords on Google Local results but in january 2013 it has droped to 2nd page on all keywords. After my checking i had found keyword staffing on place page which i have removed two months back. During last two months site was on 2nd page but now it is dropping more. Website is listed on all major local directories. What is the best way to handle such website case for local seo to get back rankings ??? what should be our new plan or strategy ??? I will be very thankful to all of you for best suggestion.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Blogging on Drupal Blogs. White Hat or ?
Recently, we noticed a website in our site rise higher in SERP shortly after launching. The key strategy they are using is to Blog on High PR Drupal Blogs, which allow you to create profile and write articles. What does the community here think of such tactic. Is it a grey area, or considered a White Hat technique?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | potterharry0 -
What do Bing and Yahoo look for in a site?
Do Bing and Yahoo look for authoritative sites like google does? Do they punish sites for black hat or spamming? The reason I ask these questions is because one of my competitors was ranking in first place for many great keywords in Google, they have the highest authority out of all of their competitors. They must have been punished by Google because now they are not ranking for any great keywords in Google. However they are ranking 1st in Bing and Yahoo for most the top keywords, getting the the most visibility out of all the sites. I attached a small Graph with latest visibility for the sites with the top keywords from google and then I also included the company that was punished from google they are the green circles on the graph. dIVI4.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0