Danny Sullivan who is now working within Google search has responded to an SEO who has sent several complaints to Google over competitors outranking him for his own content. Danny Sullivan and him went back and forth, with Danny explaining to him that his complaint was reviewed but Danny was advising him the way he submitted the complaint was not the best.
Here is the complaint on Twitter:
We’ve been having issues with scraper sites outranking us for Quick Answer boxes for months now. Now our traffic dropped another 10% after a 50% drop before.
— How-To Geek (@howtogeek) August 2, 2018
This is how Danny Sullivan responded:
And I know you did in Feb. Do it again. And skip the "negative SEO links" stuff and focus on fresh examples about the actual thing that's of concern -- that you're saying scraper sites are outranking original content.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 2, 2018
Danny said he knows he submitted a complaint and suggested he put aside the "negative SEO links stuff." Super interesting that Google would ignore a complaint because the SEO thinks he knows the cause issue, even if the cause issue is incorrect, shouldn't Google look at the end result?
Google admitted to seeing the report on some level, Danny himself is publicly mentioning details of it:
About your ignored report. I know it. That's why I mentioned it. You led with a "I'm being negative SEO attacked" and provided on single example of a LinkedIn page outranking you combined with external Quantcast data on a traffic drop. So....
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 2, 2018
He goes on to suggest how to submit this feedback in the future:
I'm telling you that focusing on some current and several examples of Featured Snippets where you say someone with your content is outranking you now being posted in the forums would perhaps be helpful. You know, someone from Google telling you that. You can ignore that....
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 2, 2018
And generally, as we'd tell anyone, look at your stats to understand if you're seeing a drop for particular pages or particular terms. In short, the more specific an issue you can raise in the forums, the more Googlers or others have to help.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 2, 2018
Honestly, maybe Google should have looked at the issue and figured out the cause of the issue themselves? For all I know, they did this and didn't communicate their findings to the SEO after reviewing it. But who cares if the SEO is blaming negative SEO? Does it matter really? Yea, it can be an annoying thing for Googlers to read but so what?
Of course, Google doesn't have to respond to any of these requests. But this exchange does provide some insight into the process that we have really never seen before.
What do you all think of how Google handled this one?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
