Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley:
how to defend against black art SEO.

James Dooley:
There's a lot of people in the SEO community talking about black art strategies and a lot of sites being hit hard. Um, today I've got no other than Brian Ko um who's speaking over in SEO Mastery Summit. He's got a full talk on this at Mad Singer event and I'm looking forward to listening to that. But I want to try and dig a little bit deep prior to this talk of what you're doing on stage. And first and foremost, for anyone that doesn't know who Brian Ko is, can you give a little bit of background very quickly about your kind of cyber security background and why you know about how to defend against black ICO?

Brian Ko:
Yeah, so initially when I got into marketing, I was a full stack developer. Uh was doing a lot of online reputation management. So understanding like hey you can move things up you can also move things down in the SER um not realizing that that's you know that that in and of itself is kind of SER manipulation right but we just call it reputation um so over the years of being in SEO um I I started to get more involved in the intersection between marketing and cyber um because what I was finding is that a lot of people you could rank them but they didn't have that foundation that someone could come along, trash their brand or trash their site. And it's great if you're ranking number one today, but if you're completely de-indexed and off the grid the you know next day, how well was that really optimized or how how well does that marketing channel work for you? So that's kind of how I got into it.

James Dooley:
That's cool. So with regards to defending against the blackout strategies, what is there any specific blackout strategy you're seeing at present that's rife that people might not know about and and what do people need to look out for initially? So what what the different strategies that are being used and what to look out for and identify before at least trying to defend it?

Brian Ko:
Yeah. So, the first thing that I want to just make very clear for people is that a lot of negative SEO or a lot of the attacks that I get called in to take a look at, a lot of them are self-inflicted. They hired a less than desirable link builder. They had a crappy, you know, link strategy. They their site, as you were mentioning, like it's just not optimized. You know, a lot of it tends to be self-sabotage.

Brian Ko:
The instances in which I see true attacks happen um they tend to come through either a entity poisoning vector. So someone undermines who you are and your entire brand. They say it's something else, right? And it's that decoupling of your brand. In all honesty, the the big thing that a lot of people don't understand is anything that you can do to move your business up in rankings can also be done to move a business down in rankings. It just it's all about the implementation.

James Dooley:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, entity recognition is so important nowadays. Like brand brand is key. And if someone's then disambiguating against the brand um online and trying to make out you're somebody else, I can completely see why that's going to, like you said, bring them down because that's what everyone's trying to do now with regards to entity recognition. Repeat who you are, repeat what you do, repeat why you're great. So if someone's doing the opposite, it's going to have a negative effect. The clarity and the confidence score is going to drop with who you are. And when they when they don't have that confidence, it can have a negative effect. But what like what can people do about this then? So how how do you defend like I've got a nice brand. I've got a positive brand ser. I've got loads of positive reviews, testimonials, case studies. I've worked really hard for the last 10 years in building up my entity. And then someone has got a problem with me and they're coming after me and I want to try to defend against this person that's got a problem against me who's trying to take me down. how can I defend against that?

Brian Ko:
So, I think the the first thing that we typically recommend for people is understand what your baseline and what normal looks like. Um, we've seen instances where people will like a true attack is going to be coordinated. It's going to be very calculated and it's not something where I'm just going to throw a bunch of crappy links at something. Google by and large just disregards that. Now that said, if you are attacking the entity, the knowledge panel, if you're looking at uh disambiguating or ambiguating rather the the entity, those can all be um attack vectors. The other thing that I I tend to see is um like with reviews, if you uh you know, if someone goes out, leaves a false review, review bombing is a big thing right now. Um, and then you know, uh, canonical, that's actually another thing that kind of goes into that whole self-sabotage thing, but, um, I've seen a lot of sites that don't have the proper canonical on there, and that opens you way up for attacks.

James Dooley:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, we've had some horrible instances um where people have been leaving one-star reviews on certain brands who what we're working on and literally they're reaching out to us on the contact form saying, "I've left you these 30-star reviews. If you want us to change into five star reviews, it's £50 each." And you're just like, "How are these sticking?" Like, if I want to try and go and get reviews from real people, a lot of them get taken down and the real reviews. So, how are these fake reviews sticking? And it sometimes feels like the Google or um some of the others have got more emphasis on if you leave a fivestar, they automatically think it's fake. But some of these one stars they allow to stick and it's like horrendous. But what can someone do on that? Is there is it just literally reaching out and just hopefully and praying that Google will decide that yes, it is a fake account and to take it down. Should you be trying to respond to the reviews, but then you kind of Yeah. What? just respond and say this, "We don't have your records on file. It's a fake review."

Brian Ko:
Interestingly enough, on that one, um that's actually the most common response I get from people is they're like, "We have no record of working with you." The reason that that doesn't really work well is because maybe that's why they're not wanting to work with you. You know, if if I went into a coffee shop and you've got your branded logo shirt and you cut me off in the line and turn around, give me the finger, right? and why would I spend my money with you? That's 100% a one-star review. And I can leave that because the the terms around reviews are really loose. It's a genuine engagement with the business that constitutes as a review. And so if someone does leave you a one-star review, I think that's kind of where Google looks at it and it's like, well, just saying that we don't have record of you, it isn't going to do it enough. Usually how we recommend to do this is we'll frame it in a positive. We'll say hey you know clearly either we messed up or you know we we always find that genuine engagement and genuine reviews are better than just a star rating. Those are the ones that I tend to see stick is it's just a star rating because there's nothing Google can go off of. You're not really violating terms. It's just a star rating. So, usually what we do is we respond with um something to the effect of we always find it better when people leave us feedback or tell us what we did to deserve a one-star rating and then we'll go and report it.

James Dooley:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So then what else then? So obviously there about um poisoning the the the brand and stuff like that and you said there about self-sabotage. So obviously like you said now Google are pretty good at ignoring if someone went and did 10,000 blog comments on GSA or RankX or uh Money Robot or whatever, whatever it is, Google's pretty good at just going, "We get it. It's spam. We're going to ignore it." But some of these people that are doing it on PBMs and they're doing an exact match anchor to a money page that looks like something that an SEO would normally do to try and increase rank, but it's on a toxic PBM. what what could people do there? Because is does the disavow then help you prevent that from passing it or is it still going to affect ranking?

Brian Ko:
So, I'll be completely honest. I have very very rarely disavowed anything. I think that there in in my tenure as an SEO, I've disavowed maybe three or four times. It's not something I typically do. Usually, what we do is we build better links or we'll we'll look at that topical relevance. we'll look at the the actual semantics around you know the link and the anchor and we'll just build better links. Um oftent times even though a link is de-indexed or ignored um you know it can still potentially pass a little bit of juice. So that's that's one of the the things that we would look at. One thing that we are very very particular on is um any kind of CISAM notifications, child exploitation. That's a no-go that those things get disavowed immediately.

James Dooley:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, anything that's buy guns online or anything to do with pedophilia and stuff like that like straight away. Yeah. Um, what else then with regards to like I don't want I don't want to go too deep on it because obviously you've got the full talk in Vietnam, but what is there anything else that we can talk about that doesn't give the game away for the Vietnam talk that you're doing that defending black hat spam?

Brian Ko:
So, the one thing I would mention on that is that the worst negative SEO comes from within and comes from within Google. So that's we'll just we'll leave it at that. They they'll have to see the the full presentation for that. But some of the worst negative SEO that I've seen is actually when you weaponize the system that is supposed to help you against someone.

James Dooley:
Yeah. So I'm going to I'm going to close it at that. Brian, it's been an absolute pleasure. anyone that wants to know more about how you could be self-sabotaging without even realizing you could be doing certain things within Google and you don't even know whether it's having a negative or positive impact and it could be harming your site. Make certain you get over to SEO Master Summit. Brian, it's been an absolute pleasure. And if anyone else has got any questions about blackout strategies, could be about virality and CTR manipulation that's coming through with short clicks with regards to nav boost and certain issues with that. Leave a comment on the comment section. Both me and Brian will both be reaching out and responding through to you. There is a lot of different blackout strategies at present which annoys me because I don't think people should try and win on merits but it's part of the game nowadays. Brian obviously from his cyber security background knows how to defend quite a lot of this. Brian, it's been a pleasure and I'll see you again soon.

Brian Ko:
Sounds great. Thanks, James.