Published: Jul 26, 2007 - 10:53 am
Story Found By: Skitzzo 1767 Days ago
Category: Link Building
12 Comments
12 Comments
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Comments
Sadly I fear people are always going to worry about this.
I cant wait to see the results.
nice post, I would also love to see the results... valuable info.
At the 2007 NY SES, Evan Roseman, a software engineer at Google stated that it is indeed feasible but still highly unlikely that a competitor can hurt you by pointing hundreds or thousands of "bad links" to new, unestablished, and untrusted domains.
Send, Even if thats the case, how well would you be ranking if you were a "new, unestablished, and untrusted domain"? I mean what would be hurt?
Im totally with you I have said for a while that it is not possible to hurt someones rankings via links.
I have linking nightmares.
"I have linking nightmares"...me too!
I was involved in a test a little over a year ago where an established website with a limited link profile suddenly had 1000s of links pointed at it from a link farm / "bad neighborhood".. Not one or two, or 100s, thousands from sub domains, duplicate pages, the works.. The site dropped significantly for the city keyword search we hit it with in the anchor text.. The site had been static for nearly a year with no work done on it.. Limited link profile, less than 100 IBLs.. And it all but vanished in short order.. Removing the link dump caused the site to recover in about 3 months with no work at all done to the site.. Could this happen to an active site, or one with a more in depth link profile?? No idea, but I would guess that it might be less than likely.. I dont know if more testing was done to refine the information.. I didnt offer up any more sites to test on..
The article reminds me of the Saboteurs of Search that appeared in Forbes recently. Heres a quote: "Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitors site to reduce its search rank isnt impossible, but its extremely difficult. "We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it," he says. "I wont go out on a limb and say its impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice." Link: http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/negative-search-google-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0628seo.html
Create a new empty site on a new domain and then pay for an obvious PageRank 7 link with the anchor text "online poker". Then create at least 5 splogs on blogger.com doing the same. Link the site from your homepage at first. Create another empty site on another domain. Link the site from your homepage. Compare both.
Bad links may not help, but they can never hurt. If they could, I would just point bad links to all my compeditors websites and destroy there rankings.
Google knows this, and that's why they only devalue links or ignore them as this keeps bad websites from getting high rankings. And lets the good ones rise to the top.
However, linking to SPam sites or link farms or any site Google has deemed as bad CAN hurt you.
Be very careful with your reciprical links, and who you link too. Google knows good sites link to quality websites.
Glad this myth is killed.