Negative SEO blog : SEOassassin

In an interesting object lesson in SE evolution, I’ve watched the SERP for the term “negative SEO” mutate greatly over the last few days. I was a comfortable #1, but with a few “power domains” picking up on the term, and referencing the Forbes article, I have been pushed back to #6 (as I see it at time of writing). The interlopers are :

Forbes.com (not unexpected, really)

Philipp Lenssen (a search A-lister)

Dannys’ place (another search A-lister)

John Andrews (John’s a curious one for me. Sometimes I agree with him, and we are right in step. Sometimes I think he’s dead wrong, and wonder how the hell he survives online. I suspect that he’s an embittered cynic, and remember “cynic is just a word used by idealists to describe realists”, who TRIES to believe, so hard. Kind of an online lapsed Catholic)

Andy Beal (actually a contributed piece bylined to Jordan McCollum) (I gather Ms McCollum rather disapproves of the whole thing )

There’s a couple of reprints of the above, below, plus a Nutscrape story, the inevitable Dugg version, and a few sites I overtook a while ago. In short, some serious authority has moved in on the neighbourhood, and my crib is looking shabbier by comparison Goddamn, I wish I could have gotten a nice, fat link, with “negative SEO” as the anchor text…

Longer term, the REALLY interesting thing will be whether this has introduced an association between the term negative SEO, and the practices. As of this precise moment, there is NO formal (or even informal) term for the group of tactics more concerned with demoting another site as opposed to improving your own rankings. Old timers may remember the SEO / SEM thing, and Danny Sullivans campaign to associate SEO to organic rankings, and SEM to paid activity. On the whole, the campaign has been successful, and I think it’s more or less accepted that the 2 terms ARE different, and there is broad agreement as to what each means.

Given how little discussion of these kinds of topics there is, even within the SEO community, I will be fascinated to see how this one turns out in say 12 - 18 months time. Via the SEL link above, I spotted a link to Ralphs blog which mentions “dirty tactics”, but uses the descriptor “black SEO”. Interesting that he chooses a different terminology, but also curious. The keywords list at the bottom of the post contains the following

black hat, seo, black search engine optimization, negative seo, inverse seo, black seo, consultation, seo protection, seo sabotage

Personally, I can’t see any version of “black…” gaining general currency. The US is still the largest / most advanced single market for pretty much all things WWW, and the potential for racial overtones attaching themselves to “black SEO” or derivative phrases is too great. I can picture the sales meeting where that all goes horribly wrong…

The other options are “inverse seo” (too many people will have to look up “inverse” - non-starter), “seo protection” (insert your own Mafia / Goodfellas / Godfather joke here), “seo sabotage” (too melodramatic - “Hey pal - wanna buy some SEO Semtex?”. No, no, no) and “negative SEO”. I reckon “negative SEO” gets it pretty much by default.