Google Bowling and Negative SEO: Tearing Down Rather Than Building Up

There's been a lot of talk recently about some methods of dirty SEO, known collectively as Negative SEO. The basic premise behind these methods is the simple idea that it is quicker and easier to rear down your competition than it is to build yourself up.

Ethical, white-hat SEO is a long process that requires hard work and patience. And, let's face it, people turn to the Internet to do business specifically because they think they can avoid hard work and patience.

This desire for the quick fix led to SEO's trying to exploit every possible loophole they could find. The search engines, however, quickly closed up those loopholes in their ongoing drive to provide relevant results.

And it was in a recent move to close one of these loopholes that may have possibly opened another. But this new loophole isn't the same as the old ones. This loophole doesn't give you a chance to artificially push your site to the top of the search engine results, but artificially bring the competition down to your level.

The practice is called Google Bowling, and, in theory, it came about when Google created a filter that penalized site-wide paid links, or other unnatural methods of gaining links too fast. The penalty was created because SEO's were realizing that links carried a lot of weight on Google, so they started devising their loopholes, trying to building thousands upon thousands of links in the quickest time possible. The filter penalizes that site, trying to stop the practice of link spamming, but theoretically opened the door for Google Bowling.

Google Bowling involves the same sort of link spamming but now you're doing it for someone else's site. In other words, framing them so Google will ban them or, at the very least, bury them way down the search results. This would, in turn, leave the top spots tantalizingly open for the less ethical and less relevant sites to fill.

Recently this practice has made it into the mainstream media where SEO's have claimed that companies will pay them exorbitant fees to employ Google Bowling or other Negative SEO strategies in their campaigns. But the question that has been floating around after the coverage is whether or not these tactics actually work.

Theoretically and logically speaking, it could work, and those unethical SEO's certainly claim it does. Unfortunately they can't and won't give an specific examples of who this supposedly worked on. (With good reason, as it would only invite repercussions, counter attacks, and, in some cases, legal ramifications.) So without proof we're stuck with speculation, which usually follows the line of: I heard it happened to my cousin's friend's niece's website. It was awful. But mostly the Google Bowling theory is based on the idea that, given what has been observed, these negative practices could work.

Of course, there's also Google's own statement that practitioners latch onto. There's a section on their Webmaster Central site that states: "There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." The unethical SEO's hold onto that "almost" as conclusive proof that Negative SEO works.

Matt Cutts, from Google, however, says: "I won't go out on a limb and say that it's impossible. But Google Bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice."

Taking these statement together could imply that the actual concession being made by the "almost" is not manipulative Negative SEO, but malicious hacker attacks and other, more extreme, measures.

But now let's move past questions of existence and feasibility and right into questions of ethics and implications.

If Google Bowling does work, should you use it?

What are the risks? There's the risk that it doesn't actually work. In this case all you've done is given your competition a huge boost and a massive amount of links. Good job.

There's also the risk of destroying your reputation. What happens if someone discovers you're one of those companies who doesn't actually deserve high rankings. And, since it seems unlikely that these strategies would have any noticeable effect on old, established sites. They would probably have the most influence on more fluid and already questionable industries (i.e. The PPG industries ? Pills, Porn, and Gambling). And are these really the business models you want to follow?

So we finally come to the main question. How do you want to use your (generally) limited marketing budget? Even if Google Bowling does work, and even if you pull down enough sites to get yourself listed pretty high, you still don't have the most relevant content or even a comparatively usable site since you've used all your budget pulling others down rather than making yourself better.

And now that you have higher rankings, and your potential customers have found you... what have they really found? A substandard, irrelevant site.

Congratulations.

This is a subject that will wee more and more coverage as more and more SEO's attempt it or more and more companies convince themselves that quick and easy equals success and money on the Internet. But in the end, just like all the other unethical SEO practices, Google Bowling is just as likely to damage you as much as your competition.

Andy Eliason is a writer at Main10, a Utah SEO company that specializes in ethical search engine optimization. If you'd like to learn more about their Internet Marketing Solutions visit http://www.main10.com/marketing/internet_marketing_solutions.php or http://www.main10.com/marketing/search_engine_marketing.php