Google explains exactly why negative SEO doesn't work

Google's Gary Illyes answered a question about negative SEO and provided some useful insight into the technical details of how Google prevents low-quality spam links from affecting regular websites.

The answer about negative SEO was given in an interview in May and hadn't gone unnoticed until now.

Negative SEO

Negative SEO is the practice of sabotaging your competitors by providing them with a large number of low-quality links in order to make Google think they are spammy and remove them from search engine results pages (SERPs).

The practice of negative SEO originated in the highly competitive online gambling space, where the rewards for high rankings are high. I first heard about it in the mid-2000s (probably before 2010) from someone in the gambling industry.

Nearly every website that ranks for a meaningful search query will attract low-quality links, which is not uncommon and has always been the case. The concept of negative SEO has become more prominent as the Penguin link spam update has made site owners more conscious of the state of their inbound links.

Does negative SEO harm you?

The person interviewing Gary Illies was answering questions from the audience.

She asked:

“Does negative SEO through spammy link building – where a competitor dumps tens of thousands of links to another competitor – still hurt people, or has Google pushed it aside?

Google's Gary Illyes began by asking the interviewer if he remembered the Penguin update, to which the interviewer replied “yes” and answered the question.

He then described his experience reviewing examples of negative SEO sent to him by site owners and SEOs: out of the hundreds of cases reviewed, there was only one that may have actually been negative SEO, but he said the Web Spam team wasn't 100% sure.

Gary explained:

“When we launched Penguin, we got a ton of complaints about negative SEO, especially link-based negative SEO, so I very unwisely asked people to show me examples, show me how it worked, show me whether it actually worked, etc.

And I got hundreds, literally hundreds, of examples of alleged negative SEO, but not all of them were negative SEO. They were always so far from negative SEO that I didn't bother looking into them any further. I did, however, send one to the web spam team for review, and although they haven't come to any verdict yet, it could have been negative SEO.

My point here is that the fear of negative SEO is far greater than it should be, and we are invalidating a ridiculous number of links…”

Above is Gary's experience with negative SEO. Next he explains exactly why “negative SEO links” are ineffective.

Links from unrelated topics will not be counted

About 30 minutes into the interview, Gary confirmed something interesting about how links are evaluated, and it's important to understand: Google has long looked at the context of the linking site to match it with the linking site, and if there's no match, Google won't pass on the PageRank signal.

Gary continued his answer.

“If you see links from completely unrelated sites – pn sites, pure spam sites, etc. – it’s safe to assume that we’ve disabled links from those sites, because one of the reasons is that we’re trying to match the topic of the target page with the site that’s linking from – if they don’t match, then why on earth would we use those links?

For example, if someone links to your flower page from a Canadian casino that sells Viagra without a prescription, why would you trust that link?

“I don't think I'd worry about it. I mean, I think you'd be better off finding something else to worry about.”

Google matches topics to pages

There was a time in the early days of SEO when thousands of off-topic links could propel a site to the top of Google search results. Some link builders offered universities a “free” traffic counter widget that, when placed in the footer, included a link to the client site, and this worked. But Google severely restricted such links.

Gary’s statement that links must be relevant is consistent with what link builders have known for at least 20 years: the concept that off-topic links don’t count in Google was understood back when people were interlinking.

I don’t remember everything that every Googler said about negative SEO, but this seems to be one of the few times a Googler explained in detail why negative SEO doesn’t work.

Watch Gary Illyes answer your question at the 26 minute mark.

Featured image: Shutterstock/MDV Edwards

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