Google Algorithm Updates - 2024 Ongoing Discussion

Smith said:
not doing anything about it because Google says it's cool, you can relax
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How I met Grindstone: I was a random guy in the crowd at WickedFire. I saw a link to the forum from BlueHatSEO.com and joined, then lurked for about a year.

This guy named Grindstone launched a service called "Spam Gone Wild" - SGW. Everyone was buying his service and swearing by it, so I decided to try it. It was like $250 or something, I don't recall. I bought it for "commercial real estate loan" and "commercial loans" ( don't quote me on the keywords, this was 10-14+ years ago) for a side project.

The side project was getting about 2-4 leads a week at the time. I just wanted to see what was what.

Within 10 days the site was generating 50-80 form leads a day, along with 5-10 phone calls per hours, every hour, 24 hours a day. We were #2 world wide for the terms I went after.

We killed that project about 2 years later - and the website is STILL generating 10+ leads a day, till this day.

SGW crowned Grindstone as the King of Spam. This was around 2010-2012, don't quote me on the exact dates. WickedFire is where I met a lot these guys, Gael from Authority Hacker was in the Daily Hustle group at Wickedfire with me and eliquid where we came up with SERPWoo.

Eventually Google went after @Grind personally and tanked his personal sites pretty badly from the stories I gather. They made a massive update cause of SGW. Same for @eliqiud with his SpamWow and other spam services.

So - if one of the top spammer in the world is telling you guys to disavow - I'm going to listen. That's it.

Same with eliquid - if he tells me to do this and that with paid ADs, or I can't do this, I listen. I don't ask questions.

There are things I know about programming and marketing where people just listen because the results speak for themselves.

We're dinosaurs now and can't be fucked to care whether you guys live or die in the SERPs. But every time now I get PMs or Skypes about a website tanking, I immediately look at their backlinks and low and behold they all have links to images files with exact or partial anchors from some domain 11.111.11.111.

You guys can't show a website that's tanking with HCU with a clean backlink profile. That's what it's come down to.

And anyone listening to Google, or Lilly or these SEO gurus that just rehash shit we've been saying years ago - give me a break, we are suppose to take any of them seriously?

I guarantee it - within 6 months all those SEO gurus are going to be going on and on about disavowing scraper and spam sites to recover - magically. Like they discovered it - no they just read shit we've been saying months and years ago.

The reality is there is nothing to lose by disavowing link from low quality sites and links to your images files.

Why people think Google has some magical voodoo is beyond me. Algorithms are math problems - not magic.

Every site tanking has these scraper spam, it's not rocket surgery here. Local sites don't get hit with these scrapers cause they mostly rank locally - why would spammers go after some MomAndPopIceCream.biz website?

You guys are making it way too complicating - you're over-engineering the problem so at some point you can give up or something.

I noticed something though - the people that are serious tend to take our advice and start the disavowing process, because they have a real business to run and this isn't a hobby for them.
 
CCarter said:
How I met Grindstone: I was a random guy in the crowd at WickedFire. I saw a link to the forum from BlueHatSEO.com and joined, then lurked for about a year.

This guy named Grindstone launched a service called "Spam Gone Wild" - SGW. Everyone was buying his service and swearing by it, so I decided to try it. It was like $250 or something, I don't recall. I bought it for "commercial real estate loan" and "commercial loans" ( don't quote me on the keywords, this was 10-14+ years ago) for a side project.

The side project was getting about 2-4 leads a week at the time. I just wanted to see what was what.

Within 10 days the site was generating 50-80 form leads a day, along with 5-10 phone calls per hours, every hour, 24 hours a day. We were #2 world wide for the terms I went after.

We killed that project about 2 years later - and the website is STILL generating 10+ leads a day, till this day.

SGW crowned Grindstone as the King of Spam. This was around 2010-2012, don't quote me on the exact dates. WickedFire is where I met a lot these guys, Gael from Authority Hacker was in the Daily Hustle group at Wickedfire with me and eliquid where we came up with SERPWoo.

Eventually Google went after @Grind personally and tanked his personal sites pretty badly from the stories I gather. They made a massive update cause of SGW. Same for @eliqiud with his SpamWow and other spam services.

So - if one of the top spammer in the world is telling you guys to disavow - I'm going to listen. That's it.

Same with eliquid - if he tells me to do this and that with paid ADs, or I can't do this, I listen. I don't ask questions.

There are things I know about programming and marketing where people just listen because the results speak for themselves.

We're dinosaurs now and can't be fucked to care whether you guys live or die in the SERPs. But every time now I get PMs or Skypes about a website tanking, I immediately look at their backlinks and low and behold they all have links to images files with exact or partial anchors from some domain 11.111.11.111.

You guys can't show a website that's tanking with HCU with a clean backlink profile. That's what it's come down to.

And anyone listening to Google, or Lilly or these SEO gurus that just rehash shit we've been saying years ago - give me a break, we are suppose to take any of them seriously?

I guarantee it - within 6 months all those SEO gurus are going to be going on and on about disavowing scraper and spam sites to recover - magically. Like they discovered it - no they just read shit we've been saying months and years ago.

The reality is there is nothing to lose by disavowing link from low quality sites and links to your images files.

Why people think Google has some magical voodoo is beyond me. Algorithms are math problems - not magic.

Every site tanking has these scraper spam, it's not rocket surgery here. Local sites don't get hit with these scrapers cause they mostly rank locally - why would spammers go after some MomAndPopIceCream.biz website?

You guys are making it way too complicating - you're over-engineering the problem so at some point you can give up or something.

I noticed something though - the people that are serious tend to take our advice and start the disavowing process, because they have a real business to run and this isn't a hobby for them.
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This is the scene in American Gangster where Frank Lucas wears a fancy coat to the boxing match which gets him marked/ID'd by the police.
 
JOoa0ky said:
This is the scene in American Gangster where Frank Lucas wears a fancy coat to the boxing match which gets him marked/ID'd by the police.
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Yeah. I know why people are keeping their mouths quiet, and it's smart. But what ends up happening is the SEO gurus take up 100% of the conversation and since there are no blackhats or dissenters people start to believe them.

And now here we are - with people believe Google not "not disavow they are smart enough to ignore these links." if that was the case we wouldn't be seeing recoveries of HCU with the disavow method - screenshot after screenshot.

It's interest since after this everyone here should know how to negative SEO their competitors now. Wild time to be alive.
 
Everyone should ask themselves why does G not de-index all of these spam links but rather they willingly index all of them. Ever had your site de-indexed or heard of someone who had? Why there but not the no brainer spam link sites?

Because they're useful.
It's how the spiders crawl the web and discover new content.
Grind also coincidentally tells everyone to send spam links to the newly disavowed links...

"Don't worry about those links, G ignores them."
lol

There should really be a PURGE that auto runs everyday at midnight... 365 days a year but yet there is not.
 
It's just really tough to handle at scale.
Spammy backlinks are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to negative seo.

If you go to the seo related happy hours and similar meet ups. You hear some really dumb ass shit from people trying assert their power level, or retelling stories of dumb ass criminals bragging to try and get business at other drinky drinky events.
 
JOoa0ky said:
Everyone should ask themselves why does G not de-index all of these spam links but rather they willingly index all of them. Ever had your site de-indexed or heard of someone who had? Why there but not the no brainer spam link sites?
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I was asking myself this same thing. Why do they continue to exist? How are a bunch of spammers able to manipulate Google's algorithm this much? Is it just one powerful spam entity, or is it multiple people doing the same thing?

If I'm Google, this is a pretty embarrassing thing actually. They are out there preaching absolute nonsense about helpful content, providing value, blah blah blah.

So there's a giant spam attack happening right now, internet-wide, and it just so happens to coincide with Google's algorithm updates? Or has it been going on for ages and we just didn't notice it before? What a ridiculous thing that is to have it affect so many sites.

Google has got to know about it. If I'm a wearing a tin foil hat I'd suggest that Google is the one behind it.
 
chubes said:
a giant spam attack happening right now, internet-wide, and it just so happens to coincide with Google's algorithm updates
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Maybe its a group of rogue but righteous blackhats spamming the fuck out of everything they find in an effort to destroy the evil Googlenet's sorcery on the masses so the internet can be open and free again
 
CCarter said:
How I met Grindstone:
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Those were fun days. :smile:
CCarter said:
They made a massive update cause of SGW.
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Three of them that March alone. Crazy times.
CCarter said:
So - if one of the top spammer in the world is telling you guys to disavow - I'm going to listen. That's it.
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Yeah, I never thought I'd be saying that. Early days, when Google first launched the disavow tool, ~10 of us in a skype chat tried to muddy the waters by submitting the Majestic Million and the top 1000 sites over and over again....fuck you Google.

I guess I was the perfect storm...had tanked enough sites with spam to realize the why of what I was seeing. And then tested my theory repeatedly to make sure I wasn't seeing what I wanted to see.
CCarter said:
I guarantee it - within 6 months all those SEO gurus are going to be going on and on about disavowing scraper and spam sites to recover - magically. Like they discovered it - no they just read shit we've been saying months and years ago.
Click to expand...
Sad but true. I probably inadvertently launched the next great SEO Grift. Yay me.
CCarter said:
The reality is there is nothing to lose by disavowing link from low quality sites and links to your images files.
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1785347567343341599

Most recent one, if you're a subscriber you know the site. This is going to be my Magnum Opus of Fuck Yous to the SEO Olds who carry Google's water for them.

And yes, I realize this will paint another target on me. I don't care. I learned from the last time. They can come after Grindstone as hard as they want, they won't find my money sites.

Navel gazing aside, here's some interesting data from the twitter link above.

1- That's disavow only, no forced crawling or indexing yet. About to start that this morning.

2 - No Link Research Tool.

Ahrefs, Majestic and SEMrush only. Then took the Majestic and SEMrush data ran it back thru Ahrefs to get traffic data. Then applied my Authority/Traffic/KW logic I explained in the most recent video update.

Took me 4 hours. I left a ton of links LRT would say are toxic but Google likes. I know who I want to listen to there.

I suspect in 10-14 days the SEO world will be coping and seething like never before. Good times.

Politico said:
Maybe its a group of rogue but righteous blackhats spamming the fuck out of everything they find in an effort to destroy the evil Googlenet's sorcery on the masses so the internet can be open and free again
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That's a lovely thought but it's actually just those massive 'trap Googlebot' networks of doorway spam that Ralf and the boys are so kindly reverse engineering over his forum.

1000s of domains (hundreds of thousands of subdomains) auto-creating pages as fast as Googlebot can navigate them, all interlinked to hell and back, all with your internal links turned into external nofollows and your content mashed up and linking back to your images with the page title they scraped them off of.

Still unsure of if it's intentional or blowback but that's the mechanism that tanked info sites since Summer of last year.
 
Grind said:
I suspect in 10-14 days the SEO world will be coping and seething like never before. Good times.
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I'll be seething too, but simply because in the last decade I've seen nothing come of disavow file utilization. If now, all the sudden, Google operates in a way that makes this feature imperative, without telling anyone, that would be, frustrating to say the least.

But also not out of line with how their PR arm has historically operated...

FML guess I'll get back on that disavow horse one last time and see what happens...
 
I mean at least disavow does something....
They're giving us a tool that's more than just a gotcha for now......

What I wanna know is if the fake bounce rate guys and screw over your lcp chrome agent bot net spammers are actually doing anything. + if they are if there is something to do. My main sites struggling to keep its branded terms at this point.
 
secretagentdad said:
I mean at least disavow does something....
They're giving us a tool that's more than just a gotcha for now......

What I wanna know is if the fake bounce rate guys and screw over your lcp chrome agent bot net spammers are actually doing anything. + if they are if there is something to do. My main sites struggling to keep its branded terms at this point.
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Jake just started ranking for his branded terms again this morning. Unrelated? Probably not...

Sorry for repeatedly spamming my twatter but I'm short on time and I know some of you are still dubious.

This a big boy niche, 3 letter acronym you can't buy clicks for and rhymes with tree three bee.

No fresh links, just a (poorly done imo) disavow + forced link recrawl.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785380655368728654
 
secretagentdad said:
What I wanna know is if the fake bounce rate guys and screw over your lcp chrome agent bot net spammers are actually doing anything.
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I've gathered a lot of evidence - these click farms are using some more twisted Negative SEO tactics that I couldn't even come up with - and it's getting results. I'm putting together a thread - hopefully. Crazy stuff un-covered.
 
Anyone else now worried that Google will remove the disavow tool? They seem to find a way to fuck us at every turn.
 
k, submitted 4k domains and 42k urls to the disavow following the @Grind and @CCarter advice. crawling them at the moment. lets see what happens.

what i noticed:

Semrush has the most links.
Majestic and LRT had some additional that SEMrush did not, but LRT have a lot of false positives IMO.

Anyway, I made a big list combining these 3.

Some links that these tools did not see:

check your search console for redirects. wordpress redirects number pages to the page itself. I had some nasty links pointing at those. Now all urls with numbers are redirected to 410. Problem is, google only shows the link that it discovered pointing to that page, if there are more, i have no idea, so cant disawol them. got to wait for the bot to crawl it again and see its 410.

another interesting point - i saw a lot of spam links pointing to ?unnaproved comments, which did not redirect to the page, but had it as canonical, so same thing. Now all unnaproved urls also point to 410.

And the final pattern i noticed is a lot of links pointing to post/poto_name_of_a_pic_in_the_post/, so these are 410 now as well.


The problem is I still see a ton of spam links that someone is building to my site on a daily basis. And they get creative too.
 
GeorgeG said:
check your search console for redirects. wordpress redirects number pages to the page itself. I had some nasty links pointing at those. Now all urls with numbers are redirected to 410. Problem is, google only shows the link that it discovered pointing to that page, if there are more, i have no idea, so cant disawol them. got to wait for the bot to crawl it again and see its 410.
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I noticed this as well - how did you redirect them?

I'm using this code -
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /1000$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /2$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /3$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /4$
RewriteRule ^ - [R=404,L]

But it seems like it only works occasionally - some urls are still redirecting. I'm guessing there is some conflicting code in WP somewhere.
 
uzz said:
I noticed this as well - how did you redirect them?

I'm using this code -
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /1000$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /2$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /3$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /4$
RewriteRule ^ - [R=404,L]

But it seems like it only works occasionally - some urls are still redirecting. I'm guessing there is some conflicting code in WP somewhere.
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Im on nginx, so these are my rules:

Code: 
#thats for the main location
location / {
# Check for the unapproved query parameter
        if ($args ~* "unapproved") {
            return 410;
        }       
  try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
}

#thats in the domain specific conf file in the server block
location ~* /photo_ {
        return 410;
    }     
    location ~* /[0-9]+$ {
        return 410;
    }

I asked GPT to translate that for htaccess, try this:

Code: 
# Return 410 for URLs containing "photo_"
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /photo_
RewriteRule .* - [G]

# Return 410 for URLs ending with numbers
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [0-9]+$
RewriteRule .* - [G]

# Return 410 for URLs containing "unapproved" in the query string
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} unapproved
RewriteRule .* - [G]
 
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Darth said:
Anyone else now worried that Google will remove the disavow tool? They seem to find a way to fuck us at every turn.
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Grinds posting about it.
They will probably nuke your sites for having used it.....
 
uzz said:
But it seems like it only works occasionally - some urls are still redirecting. I'm guessing there is some conflicting code in WP somewhere.
Click to expand...
Did you also update robotos.txt?

Here's the adjustment:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /1000$
Disallow: /1000/$
Disallow: /*/1000$
Disallow: /*/1000/$

Also, my htaccess update was:

RewriteRule ^1000/?$ - [G]
RewriteRule /1000/?$ - [G]

This seems to be working for me so far.

FYI I got this from the article Grind shared: https://seybold.de/en/404spam-elimination/
 
chubes said:
I was asking myself this same thing. Why do they continue to exist? How are a bunch of spammers able to manipulate Google's algorithm this much? Is it just one powerful spam entity, or is it multiple people doing the same thing?

If I'm Google, this is a pretty embarrassing thing actually. They are out there preaching absolute nonsense about helpful content, providing value, blah blah blah.

So there's a giant spam attack happening right now, internet-wide, and it just so happens to coincide with Google's algorithm updates? Or has it been going on for ages and we just didn't notice it before? What a ridiculous thing that is to have it affect so many sites.

Google has got to know about it. If I'm a wearing a tin foil hat I'd suggest that Google is the one behind it.
Click to expand...
My theory is that the big brains have decided that "new content discovery" is more important than some "collateral damage" and thus spam links continue to be indexed.

Subsequent theory is that G's favorite children are protected from the collateral damage because these sites have a "spam resistant attribute", which probably reduces spam negative effects by like 99%.

It's like wearing physical/magical reduction gear in MMORPGs lol... then again I may just be crazy.
 
Ok you guys are talking super techy stuff that I dont understand.
I used the Google Disavow Tool to remove some links, but is there anything else I need to do? It seems like you all might be doing more technical stuff that I don't quite get.

Are there any guides or a simpler explanation out there?
 
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Bots are linking to wwww.yoursite.com/your-post-1000/ for like every post on a site. They'll send all the links at once and remove them all at once, prob with over-optimized anchors and no follow ratios so prob gotta block these guys. The diff post title was meant to help users when they mistype the url so they can still find the post with typos but it's being used to spam. Also, don't let it redirect to the homepage (gotta be to a 404). Redirecting to the homepage amplifies the issue. The code above is meant to block that kind stuff. For the guide, Grind has a webcast. Also, can look at the image section in Semrush. The junk tends to be there. If I misunderstood something do correct me. I'm not the most techy person either.
 
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