Google Bowling?? (article)
 

Some questions: Did the Jagger update fix this 'loophole'? How effective are 'reinsertion requests' to fixing this issue?

Google Bowling: How Competitors Can Sabotage You

Have you heard about the latest "sport" in dirty online business?
It's called Google Bowling and it represents a gaping flaw in Google's system that allows your competitors to sabotage your site to the point of getting it banned or penalized.

This can't happen, right? I mean, Google would have us believe their algorithms are not easily manipulated and that your rankings are safely under your (and their) control. But in fact there's a chink in Google's armor that can have massive consequences for any web business unfortunate enough to have aggressive and unethical competitors.

Here's the loophole, explained

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http://www.searchengineguide.com/ped.../1024_mp1.html

Bump for discussions

Fixing them could mean giving a lot of backlink to the affected site. Pretty funny when you think they wanted to harm those websites.

I dont think it is fixed as I dont see how they could fix it, and if they fix it, the damaged site will proby stay damaged.. :(

its funny because i have often found myself saying " the only way that would work is if google penalizes your site for links to your site that you can't control so it couldn't be or else people would attack their competition with links. " hmmm...

my highest bowling score is 206

Only way this can work is by removing a good part of the credit given by the ammounts of links...

well the bowling will help the competitor in yahoo

And MSN too

There has always been ways to hurt your competition before, such as circle jerk links on link farms and such. But from the popularity of this, its giving me a headache.

In the new year, I really think im going to get out of SEO for one reason... people read something, comphrehend it ass backwards and freak out. A lot of my business comes from SEO clients, but the first thing I tell them is to stay off SEO forums and stop reading 5 year old books. You would have NO idea the stupidity of these people.

I have people that send ME recommedations of what to do... they call them "suggestions" but i know exactly what they are trying to do. Such as "I think we need to create my whole site in html and php and htm so the bots read them all" and "Im going to buy 100 other domains and just link them all to that site, i read it on a forum..." Good ideas idiots

Anyway, if anyone is thinking of going into this field and take on your own clients... good luck and be prepaired!

anti engineering is art

Ive always though this would be easy to pull off.

I mean, now that spamming blogs and linklists hurts your ranking, what stops anyone from spamming someone elses url?

lol

i'll take that kind of strike any day -- :1orglaugh

Damned chinks :mad:

Chinese SE blackhats bowled your domains?

I lost one of my biggest sites due to this in July, reinsertion requests did not work, filling out a dmca form may or may not help, although it got the 20k spam pages with my sites domain removed, my site is still banned, I have heard that sites sometimes pop back into the index after the spam pages are gone

http://www.google.com/dmca.html

Man, that must have hurt. Have the recent algo changes helped your other domains from being bowled?

No idea, I no longer build sites the same way, I no longer shoot for first page se results or spend too much time building one site, the one I got fucked on was a huge cms site, 20-25k unique a day google results alone, first page results for several popular terms and single girls names, thousands of user submitted comments, had been a target for quite a while by seo spammers copying it, copying terms and content, etc, only pr6 adult site I have had

I now have hundreds of smaller sites and no problems

The clencher is google blacklisted the domain so I bought the adword for the domain name and google considers it a premium term and charges extra for it hehehe

Oh man, how ironic.

On a related note, there's been some buzz lately how to get out of the sandbox via subdomains. I don't know if I buy it. I'd have to see it to believe it.

you mean the one where you get a new domain like domain1.com and create a domain1.domain2.com on an existing indexed domain, leave it for a few weeks and then delete it and 302 the traffic to domain.com?