Rand Fishkin Challenges You To Take His Site Down With Negative SEO

[morestar]

Let the games begin!

I posted a few weeks ago that competitors can hurt your rankings - based on some of the evidence I've gathered here and there and based on the myriad of comments and posts supporting the idea, but interestingly enough, Mr. Rand Fishkin has put out a challenge to any or all SEOs to take down his sites with negative SEO - if you can!

He believes that negative SEO;

That creates an entire industry and practice that no one (not engines, not marketers, not brands) benefits from. Only the spammers and link network owners win, and that’s exactly the opposite of what every legitimate player in the field wants. Thus, I’m wholeheartedly behind identifying and exposing whether Google or Bing are wrongly penalizing sites rather than merely removing the value passed by spam links. If we can remove that fear and that process, we’ve done the entire marketing and web world a huge favor.

Are you up for the challenge? He also said in his interview with WebProNews.com that;

I’ve never seen it work on a truly clean, established site

So with this challenge by Rand, I have to say that I'm back on the fence again about whether it can be done or not. If he's willing to put his websites on the line like this he must have been doing his research, and what he states may just be true - no real established and trusted sites have anything to worry about.

So basically if anyone takes up the challenge and succeeds or not, we're going to be able to put this idea to rest once and for all. If someone does indeed succeed at knocking down his websites in the search results then Google, we've got a problem. If not then, well, Google just might be the reliable search engines it claims to be.

Is anyone going to take up his offer?

From the article I linked to above from WebProNews, there's a link directly to the post where a "negative SEO" study was done of which apparently proved that such attack can be done successfully.

What do you think?

[SteveGerencser]

Still far too many uncontrolled variables not the least of which, Google may be watching and step in manually to keep it from happening since it was made public. I like Rand, but he knows that his site does not depend on natural search to make money, so there is no risk to him anyway. Plus he created a wonderful piece of positive link bait with his statement, you created a new thread just for him.

Add to this, by targeting a high profile site like SEOMoz or RandFishkin, anyone that does this will be exposing their network for all to see, including Google. Then it's just a simple matter of making all links from the network vanish from the index, problem resolved. It would be interesting to see someone take a shot, but I doubt anyone will.

[morestar]

Add to this, by targeting a high profile site like SEOMoz or RandFishkin, anyone that does this will be exposing their network for all to see, including Google.

OK, so somehow explain how they can build a million links in one fortnight with a network...seriously...now that you put it this way, I'm actually doubting anyone will take the offer.

And why wouldn't a low profile site be able to strike back in the same way?

[SteveGerencser]

You aren't scaling properly. A million links really isn't that hard to do if you don't care what kind they are. Notice this is not a million domains, but a million links. ALN had 12k sites that Google knew about removed from the index. Each one of those sites averaged more than 100 pages. That right there is 1,200,000 potential links right there in a single network. BMR had another 5k+ sites deindexed, each with more than 300 pages on average. Another 1,500,000 potential links. We are now up to 2.7 million links with just two 'known' networks with only a few pages per site. If each of those sites had 1,000 or 5,000 pages now how many links are we talking about?

Your dating site has over 7000 pages in the index. If you had a network built with sites like that to the size of a smallish network like BMR (5,000 sites) you are looking at controlling a potential 35 million links. As it is, you need to clone your dating site less than 150 times to have a million links available to you.

As for no one taking up the challenge, why would they? What is the upside for anyone that does do it? Not much upside for a lot of downside. Finally, there is nothing keeping anyone from doing this but the willingness to do it and to pay for the links.

[morestar]

As for no one taking up the challenge, why would they? What is the upside for anyone that does do it? Not much upside for a lot of downside. Finally, there is nothing keeping anyone from doing this but the willingness to do it and to pay for the links.

Thank you so much for that clarification Steve...That makes sense...and so now, in the end, the only person who's going to try this is someone who doesn't care if they lose their network - I don't think that'll happen either...

[chrisJumbo]

The negative SEO folks already presented quite a detailed summary of how they took down one site. And frankly, it seems quite "easy" to take down a middle of the road site, which is probably where much of the negative SEO battles take place. Rand's offer is too public. From reading the various threads, I believe he really wasn't trying to create link bait to his site, but nonetheless he did.

So something semi-high profile and only publicized after the fact would need to be targeted. Suffice it to say, I think most sites are far more vulnerable than Google is letting on and that is what is sad.

Google's attempts at leveling the playing field aren't leveling it at all. They are just putting targets on many sites.

[morestar]

There's got to be another way though no? Would a link attack have to be so public? There are surely genius hackers out there that could somehow put a scheme together...

[weegillis]

There's got to be another way though no? Would a link attack have to be so public? There are surely genius hackers out there that could somehow put a scheme together...

Just an opinion, mind... As black hat and anything seedy goes, it permeates the entire fabric of the web. For every one that gets outed, ten stalk away.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Some link spammers ran a surprisingly effective anchor text bombing experiment on our homepage: https://t.co/yVG2BIGi

Rand Fishkin
3:53 PM - 24 Apr 12
http://twitter.com/#!/randfish/statu...22163063635970

[weegillis]

Next it will rotating attacks timed to just have a 24 hour effect. Without some very intelligent detection in place, or outright censorship of offshore links, Google is going to be hard pressed to keep up with the number of servers that can be employed in these attacks. It can only get worse.