gkd_uk
Well-Known Member
If your online business, like thousands of others on the Web, relies on Google searches for traffic, then Brendon Scott is a good person to have on your side.
For a price, he can boost a site to the top of Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) search results for lucrative search terms, attracting crowds of customers. And better to have Scott working for you than for your competitors. Because occasionally, Scott says, he takes a less friendly approach: reducing a competing site's visibility to searchers--or making it seem to disappear from search results altogether.
Scott offers what he and some other search marketers call "negative search engine optimization" or "negative SEO," a harmless-sounding term that amounts to sabotaging a Web site's ranking in search engine results. Sometimes negative SEO is performed for reputation management, tweaking online content so that it floats to the top of Google or Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) results, thereby pushing a critic's negative comments to a lower ranking. But in rare cases, Scott says, negative SEO involves more nefarious means, convincing Google or Yahoo!'s search algorithms to bury a competitor's site deep within search results, where its traffic practically evaporates.
Read more
For a price, he can boost a site to the top of Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) search results for lucrative search terms, attracting crowds of customers. And better to have Scott working for you than for your competitors. Because occasionally, Scott says, he takes a less friendly approach: reducing a competing site's visibility to searchers--or making it seem to disappear from search results altogether.
Scott offers what he and some other search marketers call "negative search engine optimization" or "negative SEO," a harmless-sounding term that amounts to sabotaging a Web site's ranking in search engine results. Sometimes negative SEO is performed for reputation management, tweaking online content so that it floats to the top of Google or Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) results, thereby pushing a critic's negative comments to a lower ranking. But in rare cases, Scott says, negative SEO involves more nefarious means, convincing Google or Yahoo!'s search algorithms to bury a competitor's site deep within search results, where its traffic practically evaporates.
Read more
