SEO and SEDD - the possibility of malicious deranking
When you go through SEO FAQ pages or ask an average SEO guru or a Search Engine spokesperson if Search Engine Ranking of your site can be deliberately harmed by your competitor the answer is always short and definitive: NO, no site can be harmed this way. Work to improve your site and you will score, don’t think about your competition this way!
Some recent events demonstrate that the issue is not necessarily so black-and-white.
In a remarkable post last month titled How Google handles hacked sites Matt Cutts in a rather amateur PR (I mean Public Relationships in a very old-fashioned sense) exercise describes a story in which a popular website gets hacked and how Google handles this case. A predictable happy-end crowns the story and we can’t help applauding the gracious and the merciful power of the almighty Google.
It’s not that I am taking pleasure watching the chief Google PR officer having to apologize facing another popular uprising. Neither I am worried too much about petty little sites that usually deserve much less attention and much less forgiving from the merciful one. Incidentally this case provoked quite a slightly different line of thought.
The site in question is a well-known established resource never accused of any kind of spamming activities before. The punishment administered to the site seems far too severe - not just a penalty imposed on the the ranking but a complete exclusion. I quote:
the site was classified as hacked and spammy. We stopped showing it for user queries.
Evidently it was known to Google that the site was hacked most likely webmastes had nothing to do with it, apart from being slightly careless about the security issue. So, the site itself was only indirectly responsible for the event and only via a certain degree of negligence, the punishment however was administered to the fullest extent whilst the guilty party, the culprit went unpunished. Hackers in this case had no intention to harm SEPRs of the site, they were just hunting for incoming links to their doorways. The site itself fell victim of a crossfire whilst being just an innocent bystander. It is not so difficult though to imagine that some other hackers may have a completely opposite objective and try to use the same trick to exclude, albait temporarily the victim site from search engines. In most cases one does not even need to hack a victim website to inflict damage on SEPRs. Merely placing the victim into a Bad Neighbourhood might suffice.
I have no intention of publicising or even disclosing all possible tactics that might lead to eventual SED or even exclusion of a victim site - I really fear it might set a Genie out of the bottle. Suffice to say that any literate SEO practitioner with a bit of experience can quickly design a range of tactics deliberately designed to harm SEPRs of their competitors. I propose calling such tactics SEDD - Search Engine Deliberate Deranking (as opposed to SEO proper).
The Ostrich approach to the problem prevalent at the time of writing will help no more… Unless there will be clear guidelines regarding possible SEDD issued by the major serach engines, such practice may start snowballing and this spells a disaster for all of us. So there are some questions to be asked and perhaps answered by those known to speak on behalf of our Big Brothers (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Namely, how Search Engines will behave in hypothetical cases of SEDD and is there any guarantee that SEDD is not being practiced already?
terms SED (Search Engine Deranking) and SEDD (Search engine Deliberate Deranking) are copyright © LZZR.com 
tags: google, msn, sed, sedd, seo, sepr, yahoo, deranking, hacked, hacking, lzzr.com, tactics
Posted by LZZR under SEDD, SEO Ethics, Google |
I believe my site hs experienced SEDD, as you call it.
I am currently being victimised by a competitor so it is no great surprise.
This is what happened.
Business is slow so I go check how my site is doing on google, I keep a record on excel.
I have a fixed set of search terms, I record the ranking every so often, the ranking had been stable for a month up to end of November.
Site is fairly new, most important pages rank on pages 1, 2, or 3.
When I check, my pages don’t show up, except for one which was exactly where it was a month before.
If I check through enough pages on google other less relevent pages on my site eventually show up, but not the correct, relevent page.
Even when I prefix the search term with my company/website name the relevent page is not returned, just less relevent pages like dates, fees etc
For the exclusion of pages to be so specific it surely has to be targeted to each page.
What I would like to know is how I find out who did it.
I have spoken to many people, emailed google etc to no avail.
Comment by Paul Stringer — January 24, 2007 @ 3:54 am
It is indeed hard to say. Your site looks pretty decent. At first I was thinking aboutBad Neighbourhood and checked your backlinks. They all seem pretty ok.Google Sandbox effect ” (if there is such thing of course).
It could well be that you are simply experiencing “
Seemingly, very fresh sites do well for about 3 to 6 weeks and tend to sink down rapidly and rather abruptly (sometimes disappearing completely for a week or so) after which only gradually and slowly gaining back where they were over several months. The good thing is that if everything goes fine they continue growing slowly but steadily above the initial level.
It’s a waiting game, you know.
If you are still worried, check your server logs. If you’ve been SEDDed is must show up there. You will notice either unusual traffic from one single IP, or a massive amount of strange referrers. Anything unusual you notice should be investigated (as always).
Ultimately, work on your linking strategy - you definetly need more good backlinks and a couple of really good ones can neutralise almost any SEDD attempts!
Comment by lzzr — January 26, 2007 @ 1:32 pm
[…] coincidence! It’s been just a couple of days since I had written about the possibility of SEDD and what a coincidence! In my post I was talking about Bad Neghbourhood and precisely this happened […]
Pingback by LZZR » What a SEDD coincidence! — January 31, 2007 @ 3:16 am
SEDD - Can this be done?…
Is it at all possible to derank a third-party website or it’s another scare?…
Trackback by PlugIM.com — February 12, 2007 @ 9:47 am