I guess some hedge funds are tanking a good hedge on Google, what an absolutely ridiculous business decision from Google.
I know I have been targeted by competitors for the past few months but it didn't bother me because my site kept at the top but now all of a sudden I am on page 4.
Google needs to sort this out otherwise toxic spam is going to flood the internet.

it is impossible to track all your backlinks. This only works for small websites. Bigger websites have lots of backlinks. there are so many spam websites, you can not track them all

Since June,12 my ecommerce google results almost gone from google index! Unique visitors from 900 decrase to 250! And then, 7 days ago - all my results COME BACK like in old good time! Telefon start ringing again! But the joy did not last long. Today my results, again, has gone! I dont unterstand whats going on and what should i do anymore!

Always helpful.

This is a really serious way , we all citizen need to put some concern about it.

Hmmm… Disavowing a whole country does seem like a logical way of going about it. I mean,

Hmmm… Disavowing a whole country does seem like a logical way of going about it. I mean,

Hmmm… Disavowing a whole country does seem like a logical way of going about it. I mean, Google should give us a choice right?

Then again, why do I get the feeling that it isn't good for Google (financially) to give webmasters that kind of feature.

I disavowed an entire domain that was spamming my site several months ago, only to see all the links have come back again. Now I've disavowed them again, and the links aren't going away! Google has now penalized my site and dropped my rank to nothing! I'm not buying your garbage anymore or Googles for that matter!

How do you do that? Where is there a setting to do what you suggested?

You have no idea about what you tallking here... Google wants ecommerces with name, brands - to pay google addwords!! And thats all story!!

Stronger? Are we talking about websites or bodybuilding? What does it mean stronger in SEO ? Does it mean he has better offer ? - Answer is NO. Whether it has better html title, key words, html description, images and wideos at the page's? Answer is NO. Number and quality of backlinks ? NO - my becklinks are better! And spetialy - Im at this job 7 years and that website is new! And google put me fare away from position where I have been for many years............

Amen brother

Matt Cutts saying "You should be in good shape." That is funnie. Am I the only one who thinks this pasty-faced, doughboy is a lying sack of pooh?

if you have 99 grate links and 1 bad - in google's logic - YOU ARE TOTALLY BAD!

after penguin 2.0 my online shop with PR 4 and 7 years of work is behind online shop with PR 0 and 10 month of work!...... thats google! .... big and evil !

@Matt Cutts Do you understand how serious consequences you have made with penguin 2.0 ?? Is it stumboling, redditing, twitting, writing comments and posts - is that a spam ? I know - if there is manny - yes! But thats a job for stumbolupon, reddit .... to ban that kind of users!! Not for google! Whats you did with penguin 2.0 is crime!

I can't speak for "half of the people", but I can tell you first-hand that they've answered two of my questions...in fact, they answered one about as conclusively as it gets.

They have answered their own questions before, but they've made them pretty obvious (they actually use the employees' real names). That, and with the number of silly webmaster questions, there really isn't any need to make anything up.

Agree with jeffostroff. Google should be clever enough to know that a website with a long standing good reputation is not going to go out an acquire spammy links for themself. Some of my sites have been successfully damaged by a competitor with 1000's of spam links. The webmasters don't respond and disavow doesn't work. WMT only shows a small selection. My raw server stats show 1000's of links not available in wmt.

SEO should be (and is) platform-agnostic. What is relevant for Google is also relevant for Bing. I strongly disagree that "99% gets hit be negative SEO" - it's a rare case.

As for your first question, why do webmasters need an SEO? Because you have an asset and you want to be awesome at managing that asset. I'm not saying you should pay big money to an agency, but if you suspect you've been targeted negatively by a competitor, please by all means contact someone who can help.