Negative SEO, Google Penguin, Fighting WebSpam, Speedlink 17:2012

Hello everyone! Hope you all had a great week, considering all the changes that has been happening lately on Google’s search results. Undoubtedly, it has been a crazy week(s), for search, which as you may have noticed has been on center stage recently. This is an important issue, specially if you are doing business online, and most importantly, if you have been relying on organic traffic.

News about negative SEO, Google’s continuing steps to reward quality sites, messages being received by webmasters on Google’s webmaster tools, things you should and should not do, have been flooding the web. There are forums that have been discussing whether the results of all these changes have been for the better. As you would expect, some think that it did, and some goes as far as saying that there is something bigger behind all these (disturbing). Anyway, from what I have seen, the general sentiment appears that Google may have to update its algo’s yet again, soon.

How about you, do you think that the results are better, or sort of weird?

Anyway, and as you would imagine, this weeks Speedlink will primarily focus on some great articles that I found relating to this subject. If you are one of those that “feel” have been hit by Google Penguin, or whatever, my advice is not to panic and analyze your data first, before doing some major changes. I don’t know about you, but I just have this gut feeling that doing to much changes in a short period of time, may just be generating the wrong signals. Prioritize and take it easy. Follow the topic and be updated (subscribing to my RSS or signing up for my newsletter will help you with that, lol). If you have done nothing wrong, hopefully, everything will fall back into its previous state.

As for negative SEO, it is sad to say that apparently, it can work. Negative SEO, in essence, is when someone does deliberately “bad stuff” to hurt your site. In the following video, Rand of SEOMoz goes over the “techniques” of how someone can hurt your site, deliberately. The more educated you are about this subject, the better you can defend yourself.

As usual, in no particular order: