Google bombing, fact or fiction

[Chatmaster]

I am currently assisting a bunch of webmasters that has p'd off a blackhat and he is now launching an attack at them to bowl them, as they are ranking for some of the most sought after keywords in the online casino industry.

In the last 2 weeks they each received about 200k backlinks from .pl domains. These are then reported to Google, but increases despite Google removing them. These backlinks are starting to effect them already as they are starting to get less and less referrals from google. The effects are amazing and the rate at which these domains are growing is amazing. :mad:

And then there are people telling me Blackhats are in the grey area... Anyway, any advice that any of you can think of?

[Paz]

Hi,

I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your friend's site. I had a similar situation and the site's never recovered in Google (9 months later).

My experience started a year ago for one of my first sites; a hotels site, that started picking up spammy .de backlinks from made for asdsense scraper sites. There were 2 problems with the backlinks, the fact that they were scraper sites and secondly the fact that they were 90% in a foreign language.

It was a new site and I was just starting to rank in google for a particular keyword phrase c. top 50, and then my content got scraped and killed it for that keyword phrase. Ironically, after a few months they helped me get #1 in yahoo and MSN, but as far as Google was and still is concerned, I was dead for that keyword. Other keyword phrases ranked though, but I'm guessing they attacked your big money one.

PR plays a role though. My site was a PR3 and the handful of scraper sites made up about 20% of my backlink count at that time. I'm wondering how on earth they managed to get 200k worth of backlink weight at you - (they must be sitewides?) but I'm guessing that it would need that many to take down a PR5 or 6 site.

I'm not black hat, but I'm sure that if I wanted to take down a site in Google I would just have to throw plenty of spammy links at it.

You might have a chance though. Are the backlinks targetted to a specific page eg index.htm or do they point to the domain root?

[Chatmaster]

The thing is these sites are VERY strong. All of them has more than 50k normal backlinks. They are all very old and established brands in the industry aswell, that has been around of ages.

The bl's are to the home pages only on two the domains. The others are much more serious. It seems they do a keyword density check and then target the primary keyword for that page. Using scraped content linking back to the targeted site. xhttp://760.j9wc1x.info/ is an example of such a page. When you view source you will note the backlinks to onlinecasinoreviewer. This is actually the legitimate site being bombed. Bowled seems way to calm for what is happening.

[Paz]

Yeah, it looks like they've scraped the Google serps but changed the links, but more sophisticated touches are:


the keyword rich text at the bottom making it attractive to SE's - almost like a doorway page, but without the redirect
All possible mis-spellings eg glossary pojker glossary poker gkossary poker glsosary........etc
randomly-generated text to make each page unique.


I've never seen such sophisticated spam.

I'm not entirely certain it's an attack on your site though.

I would send that page to Google if you haven't done so already.
They seem to have false Whois info, so maybe you can report them to ICANN and mention that to Google too, but how many domains are we talking about here?

The reason why I asked if they were pointing to a particular page was maybe you could just drop it. That'll hurt your rankings, and PR for sure though but it might be a quicker solution than rebuilding a domain.

The other thing to consider, as you say, is if you have backlinks to that page - ie did you get backlinks to /index.htm or to "/"

It's an absolutely awful situation - what exactly did Google say? Are you running an Adwords campaign on the site?

Cheers,
Paz.

[Chatmaster]

The way the bombing is done, its strategy is to completely destroy this website’s rankings on Google over a period of time. The internal pages have alot less backlinks making it vulnerable when the amount of bad neighborhood websites link to them. It is systematically getting Google to drop rankings for niche and more targeted keywords. It can be compared to a parasite.

These pages are being reported to Google and as far as we can see it is being removed, just to reappear in tenfold. This is by far the most advanced automated scraping and bowling I have ever seen. Although I hate to say it, this guy is very good. (for a blackhat) ;)

The only way I can think of turning the situation around is by going through the pages that has provided results in the past and has been dropped and selectively giving those pages the most appropriate contextual themed backlinks from high PR and good quality sites. I am convince that 1 good quality backlink will equal 1000’s of bad quality backlinks in relevance and quality and eventually make them to weak to influence the rankings of those pages. At the very least this will be an exceptional opportunity to test the theory of how strong certain backlinks are and provide us with enough information to work with in future.

We know who the guy is that is doing this but it is extremely difficult to proof his real identity and the threat of lawsuits from his side has made it even more difficult. The irony is that he is a speaker at some very well respected international SEO conferences. He is however most feared and regarded as the best black hat SEO by many in the casino industry. His infrastructure is amazing to say the least as he owns servers with as many as 700 sites hosted on them.

[Blazingpie]

firstly im appauled that Google would let this happen. Whatever happened to their statement that negative links could not affect your sites (ie, they'd devalue spammy links, etc)?

Secondly, although a long shot, is it posible to try and press legal charges against him? Eg, a group of affected webmasters pool resources together and then hire a hitman - er, i mean take him to court :p Surely what he's doing is breaking some legal law where-ever he's situated. I mean, this is like a virtual version of 7-11 going to each Spar and trying to burn it down :(

While he may be giving false info to the registar, he hosting companies must have records of tel numbers, etc that the authorities can get hold of. Also, any email service he uses must also track his IP address, you could use that to track him down...

[Paz]

Yes,

it is an awful story, but Google recently changed their advice to:
There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking ...
my bold text.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34449&query=competitor&topic=0&type=f

Chatmaster, I agree that recovering rankings will have to be done on a page by page basis, but it's such a lot of work and money. It's true that whoever has done this must have some SERIOUS infrastructure and knowledge and could even own a domain registrar, but there must be clues and fingerprints somewhere that an experienced analyst/hacker could follow. You'd have to start by issuing a few subpoenas for sure, but I'd be inclined to put some money in that direction too.

Cheers,
Paz.

[Chatmaster]

firstly im appauled that Google would let this happen. Whatever happened to their statement that negative links could not affect your sites (ie, they'd devalue spammy links, etc)?

Secondly, although a long shot, is it posible to try and press legal charges against him? Eg, a group of affected webmasters pool resources together and then hire a hitman - er, i mean take him to court :p Surely what he's doing is breaking some legal law where-ever he's situated. I mean, this is like a virtual version of 7-11 going to each Spar and trying to burn it down :(

While he may be giving false info to the registar, he hosting companies must have records of tel numbers, etc that the authorities can get hold of. Also, any email service he uses must also track his IP address, you could use that to track him down...


Hi Blazingpie

That is the thing. The way this is done it is impossible to get to him directly. We have the money to legally get this guy sorted, but we lack the evidence. Some of the forum members have been threatened via MSN that this will happen, but not in so many words.

Tracking this guy is extremely difficult as he is extremely well connected. He also don't make use of ISP's he is the ISP! He has several Unix boxes in countries like the Netherlands, Israel and the US. The problem is the pages used for the bowling is done through a freeserver type site. There is no way of stopping him to do this.

With regards to your 1st response about Google. They have actually been very helpfull on this issue, removing the pages as we report them. There is logical sense in what this guy is doing and Google is going through a huge learning curve with TrustRank, I am confident they will fix this soon. If you read the Trustrank paper it becomes evident that site you link to and sites linking to you are extremely important I guess this incident once again prooves this to be VERY true.

[Webzcas]

I am currently assisting a bunch of webmasters that has p'd off a blackhat and he is now launching an attack at them to bowl them, as they are ranking for some of the most sought after keywords in the online casino industry.

In the last 2 weeks they each received about 200k backlinks from .pl domains. These are then reported to Google, but increases despite Google removing them. These backlinks are starting to effect them already as they are starting to get less and less referrals from google. The effects are amazing and the rate at which these domains are growing is amazing. :mad:

And then there are people telling me Blackhats are in the grey area... Anyway, any advice that any of you can think of?

One of the webmasters Chatmaster has been kindly assisting is me :)

Thankfully the site of mine which has been targetted is extremely strong as far as google is concerned and has very strong themed backlinks - From authority sites. However many webmasters with younger sites, which have been targetted have not been so fortunate as myself.

It does appear however that google is slowly but surely taking action against many of these rogue domains.

This has been an interesting ongoing learning experience regardless. If anything it has made me strongly believe that deep links are very important.

[daniel]

Webzcas

You are 100 % correct in my opinion, the deep links are what makes the difference,

I think that Google can clean this up, and they are in the long run, If they have already started noticing, im very keen to see what happens in the next big update,

let us know how you get on

Daniel

[daniel]

mm, having another read of this thread from top to bottom, a couple of things really stand out.

I think that Paz is correct in saying that you should maybe drop that page, rename it.
It will hurt for a little while, but will bounce back.

The other thing i wanted to mention was, and i am not sure it is will work or what side effect it will have. You mentioned the backlinks all came from a particular domain extension. Can you not just create a referer script that checks if the referer came from a .pl domain and BLOCK it.

Ill need to check with some coders that i know, or even better if there are any coders reading this, please comment.
We have implemented something before that is sort of similar, using referers and blocking out domains. It worked for us.

Let me know if you guys think it will work.

Daniel

[Webzcas]

I'm going to ride this one out. It is targetting all my pages, so not feasible to change them all. My site has pretty strong links from long established sites which have great serps in the casino sector, so I am not too worried.

The younger sites though are taking a pummelling as a result.