If Google truly penalizes sites for bad linking, could my competitor sabotage me?
-
I am sure this has been discussed before (I am new). I am very paranoid about upsetting Google with questionable SEO practices. The white hat people sometimes claim that google will penalize you for bad linking, paying for links, buying social bookmarks etc.
If this is true, could my competitor do this for my site to lower my rankings? I would never know about it until it was too late. If they can't do this to me, then what's to stop me from doing it to my own site?
Maybe I am missing something here.
Thanks for your input.
-
In short, don't worry about competitors hitting you with bad links unless you are using questionable link-building practices and bad content.
-
I think you should be less worried about competitors actually trying to sabotage you if that does happen and I’ m not saying I know your situation or pretend to it is a very serious matter. However unfortunately for all of us it is true Google is penalizing people for using anchor text that is the same as a keyword or keyword phrase. It frankly does not look natural and Google has a way of now discovering it here is a article that is brief but explains a lot http://www.search-placement.com/new-google-algorithm-update I think I speak for most of us when I say “hopefully just a phase and Google will grow out of it”
The way your site has been affected which I imagine is negatively by your post would be very hard for a competitor to do in less you allowed them to have your passwords things like that where they could really sabotage your work. I am not trying to scare you however if you do believe somebody is out to get you should maybe look into a password generator and make extremely hard passwords to break. That said I myself have competitors in many fields including this one but believe most people are good and will not do something as juvenile and illegal as try to hurt the competitors website frankly I would try to make mine better if I were in that position not waste my time hurting people. However look at your analytics I hope you have Google installed at least maybe you can catch a thief. I wish you all the best and I hope this it is not Google’s attempt to make us pay per a click. Just one thing you brought up white hat SEO’s say Google will penalize you for bad linking, buying social bookmarks and paying for links. All that is true they will penalize you for that if they know you are doing it you might want to look at the amount of links you are building make it look natural go for quality before quantity if you in the past have had links built by people who even did what was considered the best practice at the time put keywords in the anchor text you may be being punished by Google for that. The way who looks at this is any manipulation of their system is bad and a posh bowl offense and a possible offense. If Google had its way people would write their own content links would only appear naturally and no one would be able to optimize their off page SEO. I do not agree with googles ideas of what we should have to do but unfortunately they make the rules. check your website for links that look out of place. I wish you the best of luck and hope that you are not really dealing with somebody stupid enough to try and hurt your site as I imagine you use this for business and that would be a crime to harm your Business.
Sincerely,
Thomas
PS I want to go on record as agreeing with the other gentlemen that have answered your question.
-
Google has recently pushed out some advice in regards to this they have the following statement:
"Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34449
-
Yeah, I heard Matt Cutts talking about this and his answer was "Google will discount those links and not count them" (or something similar to that affect) along with paid links.
I would also check out this post, this directly addresses your concern. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/lets-kill-the-%E2%80%9Cbad-inbound-links-can-get-your-site-penalized%E2%80%9D-myth/32426/
It would also depend on your current back link profile, if you have a bunch of poor quality / border line junk links and one of your competitors point a bunch or really bad links at you I can "imagine" (I don't know for sure, I have not tested this) you are going to take a hit in rankings.
Bottom line is, build good quality links and you should be golden
-
Thanks. This is how I hoped the internet would work.
I am not advocating any link spamming or unethical practices (I already learned my lesson once from Google and they don't ever forgive) but if I understand this correctly, there is really no penalty from say, buying 1000 backlinks. The only bad thing is that what little bit of value you might get would be short lived once big G catches on and is probably a waste of time and money in the long run. Is that about right?
-
You are thinking right. What would stop all the major brands to go out there and buy the "spammiest" links networks pointing to their competition. How does the competition prove they did not do it.
I think Google dealt with this years ago with the Miserable failure change.... here. They basically altered their algorithm to not give "too much" advantage of links/anchor text from all over the web. In a sense, they created the ability for their algorithm to discount the value of links, not penalize the website being linked to. Does that make sense ? I think what's happening now is not any different...they can and will continue to identify link spam, de-index link networks and manipulative techniques using pattern identification. But if not all, most cases, discount the value of those links...and not directly or not 100% penalize the site being linked to, because then technically a group of people/websites could run a mass campaign and kill any online business. That's not how the Internet is supposed to work...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What MOZ domain authority are considered bad links?
As a general rule of thumb, what MOZ domain authority are considered bad links? Ie., is it for sites that are 20 and below? What is the DA floor where you should target links from?
Link Building | | jspinder150 -
Other sites linking to our site through sitewide footers
Hello, We have other sites linking to our site through images in sitewide footers, resulting in a link from every page of each site. Those sites are not owned by us and they decided to link to us on their own. They usually link to us as their "sponsor" or "partner", sponsor as in sponsor of some event and partner as in we sometimes work together on joint initiatives. I've searched Moz forum and other articles, but haven't been able to find an answer to this question. We'd like to make sure Google doesn't consider it to be spammy and we don't get any sort of penalty. Should we ask them not to link to us through those images in a sitewide footer or ask them to simply add "nofollow"? We don't want to remove those links if they are not considered to be harmful and removing them will hurt our DA/PA.
Link Building | | marynau0 -
Bit.ly Links & Google
Does Google treat bit.ly links differently? If someone linked to my site through bit.ly, would Google see that link as if they had used the normal (exmaple.com/blogpost/) link?
Link Building | | roger2051 -
Disavow links from legit sites but have spammy link profiles?
I'm currently doing a backlink audit for our site with a LOT of backlinks. Some of the linking sites are legitimate business websites in our industry who have linked to us for a totally legitimate reason (we have good content!). However, these businesses themselves have a spammy backlink profile—that is, the only sites linking to that site are obvious link farm sites. Here is an illustration: spammyseolinks.com; payforseo.xyz; blackhat.ru ==all link to==> legitbusiness.com ==links to==> mysite.com Should I disavow this backlink? I guess it's not really giving me much SEO worth since it surely been branded a spammy junk domain, but then again, it's a real website that we've earned a link from because we're doing stuff the right way. Is it hurting or helping me?
Link Building | | THandorf0 -
How can create links of our website on . edu and .gov sites?
I want to create links on .edu & .gov sites for my website . So, what kind of activities we will do for this process and how? Can you also provide list of .edu and .gov sites for create backlinks?
Link Building | | surabhi60 -
Do you need a place to ditch bad links?
This is not a question as such, more a gift 🙂 I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links. For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site: www.mydomain.com/viagra and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links. The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo! Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page. Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links. This bypasses the lengthy link removal process. Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed. And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site. As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too. I hope it helps some people.
Link Building | | Matt_Wilson0 -
Are paid links on your brand name considered bad by Google?
I've been intrigued recently by the penalty applied to a site we have just started working with. They were penalised back in summer last year as their previous link builder had built 60,000 links all with the same hard to get keyword anchor text....we're still sorting it out. My question now is that if the client pays for inclusion on some relevant sites, such as niche directories and those sites automatically produce 'follow' links, would the client be penalised if they link on their own company name? For example if they manufacture blue widgets and the anchor text on the link is 'ABC Manufacturing' rather than 'Blue Widgets' would Google see that as a reasonable link? I appreciate that if they linked back on the keyword anchor text 'Blue Widgets' it would be wrong but I'm seeking clarification on using the company name. Any thoughts?
Link Building | | aqueous0 -
What benefit does a site with a low DA get from someone guest posting who links to a site with a high DA?
I'm relatively new to link building and although this may be an obvious question I can't seem to find an answer anywhere even after searching Google.
Link Building | | JoshED0