The Most Dangerous Link Building Myth
(in Google)
"Incoming links can’t hurt you… the most they can do is ‘not count’ ."
In my opinion this used to be true.
In 2006, it’s absolutely, certifiably, completely FALSE.
Your neighborhood better maintain a certain level of trust — both trust IN and trust OUT — or you can kiss your rankings goodbye.
To put it another way…
- You have six trusted links to your site, it’s ranking on page 2.
- Then, add 10,000 untrusted links to your site. These should theoretically just "not count", and you should still rank on page 2… right?
Then why do such sites go byebye? (I’ve seen it time and time again in the last 6 months.)
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Pete
A few questions to pick your brain if you don't mind.
If this were true, would it not open the floodgates for sabotaging competitors?
In other words, should I be afraid that my competitor will buy a 10,000 junk link package for $49 to harm my rankings?
Does the fact that my site has been indexed for X years with good behavior protect me from this potential problem?
Barry explores the issue in his post Bad Links: Can They Really Hurt You? about a year ago. He held the point of view that it would be unfair for a SE to penalize a site b/c of the potential of competitive sabotage.
I appreciate your answers and thoughts.
It would... and it does.
> it would be unfair for a SE to penalize a site b/c of the potential of competitive sabotage.
lesson of the day: Google isn't always "fair" :-)
i surely agree that there is no such thing as fair in this game ;-)
do you think that a powerhouse site that has established a strong degree of trust with the engine, can be deindexed due to overagressive linking?
Are you aware of any sites that have been in the index for 7,8,9 years or so that have virtually disappeared due to sabotage?
Patric ... I think Jill would disagree here and so would I. I mean ... this would give me the ability to go and knock off my competition! Why spend money on my own SEO if I can go spend a lot less on spamming competitors.
If you want to hammer a competitor then it suggests that gaining them lots of links quickly would hurt their positions - of course by how much is open to question.
i.e. writing and submitting articles that include a link to your site, and publishing RSS feeds for interested visitors to submit to. Both are often grabbed automatically by spam sites and likely far outnumber the legitimate sites that use these features the way they're intended.
So if Google *is* penalizing websites for inbound links, it's a very bad idea and puzzling too since it makes more sense to just discard them...
And also. If you point thousands of bad-neighbourhood links to your competitor and the competitor is strong enough for Google to believe the links don't matter, you may end up helping your competitor.
Also, it will be fun if, say someone buys a dozen thousand links from a site to point to a competitor and the competitor buys the site and changes the content. That should a) remove the actute bad neighbourhood stench b) allow the competitor even gain some authority on his subject. Anyone seen this in action?
One thing that has been spoken about for some time now is the speed with which sites obtain in-bound links. If suddenly overnight a site gets hundreds or thousands of IBLs then G is going to know this, or rather the bots are going to know this and possibly devalue these links or this may affect the listing.
The second factor about IBLs from so called 'bad' sites is that many ask for a reciprocal link and a site owner or administrator can unknowingly add links to these bad sites from a links page or sites page to the sites in question.
Some then assume that three way links will make a difference as if G isn't mapping the link structure of the web all the time and won't know this.
My advice to anyone mounting a good link building campaign is to 'think like a Search Engine' if that is possible.
What sort of IBLs would a Search Engine that's looked after by a company with more PHDs on board than any other company be valuing? It has an alogorithm that's trying to return sites ordered by relevance, while ignoring sites that are spammy, spoofy and all the rest.
These are the links that will drive you higher.
I couldnt agree more. I have seen many many sites get penalized for too many crappy backlinks. It is almost always temporary though. Once trust is built back up, the rankings seem to always come back.
As for sabotaging your competitors, not only is it possible, its being done.
Is it wise to try and do it to your competitor?.. HELL NO! Not only are you potentially going to help them more then hurt them, you are also doing something that could get your ass sued.
But there are ways to combat this at a certain level as well.
Basically, like Andy put it, if you have 2 trusted links, and 10,000 crap links, you're screwed.
But I'm 100% sure based on the quality of the trusted links, they can count significantly more in the algorithm than the sabatoging links your competitor will post to screw you.