🙈 🔗➖A Negative SEO Exploit in Search Console -- The SEM Daily: 5.17.23

or "how to protect yourself against featured snippet removal"

This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.

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Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Searcheye and is about a negative SEO use of Google’s “outdated content” tool.

the Remove Outdated Content Tool (https://search.google.com/search-console/remove-outdated-content) can be used for removing other website’s featured snippets.

It also, mysteriously, seems like it might be impacting ranking, which it shouldn’t.

There is some evidence for this, where shows a post his site has the featured snippet for, does a “-domain” search to show what the next URL in line to get the featured snippet is if his wasn’t around, and then puts in an “outdated content” report of his own domain to see what would happen.

The result?

His article still has the first organic spot, but it has lost the featured snippet.

He did the same thing with a Screaming Frog Twitter carousel (with their consent—basically).

From this:

To this:

No more carousel, and the screaming frog twitter page went from spot #2 (carousel) to page 3.

Here’s a look at the outdated content removal request being granted:

This might be one of those things that seems ‘fine’ from Google’s perspective. The sites do eventually recover? As long as someone doesn’t repeatedly submit the same URLs, it’ll be fine.

• If you have featured snippets, they are likely vulnerable to this technique, albeit temporarily.

• If you are attempting to rank for a seasonal event, you are likely very vulnerable to this technique, albeit for the entire duration of the season.

• If you are ranking on someone else’s platform, you are even more vulnerable to this.

My hope is that Google will properly investigate potential misuses of this tooling. If not, there are plenty more misuses to be surfaced.

It is possible to use your own Search Console to cancel these requests, so… maybe this is something you should occasionally check—or check if you see your rankings fluctuation (ESPECIALLY around a featured snippet).

Here’s the full post if you want to take a look.

Coming up: my take on this whole thing. But first, a word from our sponsor:

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My Take

The author says he is making this public in the hopes of putting pressure on Google to fix this exploit.

I’m just making this even more public because while, yes, you can use this abuse your competitors (you should not), you should also be aware that this is a thing that could possibly happen to your own site, so keep an eye out.

I’m just looking out for you, dawg!

It’s incredible just how much this can alter the SERPs (removing a Twitter carousel, kicking a page out of a featured snippet, etc). I wonder if this is something Google will look into.

Not a huge take on this one, just: wow. And make sure you check for this yourself if you’ve lost a bit of traffic recently. It’s probably NOT this but… doesn’t hurt to check.

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Links, Resources, and Recommendations

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Until tomorrow…

Sean Markey
sem@hey.com

PS — LMK what you thought of this quick SEO email. Good? Bad? “A bit shite” as a reader reached out and shared? I’d love to hear from you (and thank you to those of you who read and have responded already!)

PPS — I swear I take the “daily” part of this email seriously, but we had a BIG situation here the last two days with a sick cat. It was fucking wild. The grossest thing, I’m not going to put what it was in this newsletter, but if you’re an internet weirdo and you want to know what this awful, crazy (gross) thing was, hit reply and ask me. I wrote it up, I’ll share it with you. But I did warn you…

(cat is mostly fine now. recovering)

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