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Surely inbound links have no bearing on your search ranking...that would be a remarkably stupid way for Google to empower the worst citizens of the web to hold

Surely inbound links have no bearing on your search ranking...that would be a remarkably stupid way for Google to empower the worst citizens of the web to hold the rest hostage. It would become trivially easy to outrank any legit site by bombing them with links from your spam farm. Where YOU link has an effect on your ranking, but surely not who links TO you. Right?

rms 16y ago
I call it the negative SEO bomb. Gain control of a bunch of sites that are hosting viruses, autodownloading exe's, or otherwise performing unlawful hacks on the user. Then start linking to all of the people who rank higher than you. You could pick off all of your pagerank competitors one by one. (this is theoretical, but I don't see why it wouldn't work in a probabilistic sense)
- tapp 16y ago
  It's more popularly referred to as "Google bowling." A couple years back, Matt Cutts acknowledged that it was possible, though he also stated they have countermeasures making it very difficult to do in practice.
Andrewski 16y ago
"that would be a remarkably stupid way for Google to empower the worst citizens of the web to hold the rest hostage" It is easy to forget that Google is not the Internet. A time goes on, SEO will cause Google to become nearly useless, and people will move onto greener pastures.
nostromo 16y ago
There's a lot of speculation around it. On WebmasterWorld you'll hear stories of people who bought no paid links get delisted because of spammy links. The'll say a competitor bought the links to their website, then reported them to Google for black-hat SEO -- basically setting them up and then turning them in. Of course, this is the first defense anyone would use if they were caught actually link spamming -- so who can tell how common it is. (By the way, I don't see how Google could tell either.) There are rumors of other bad things going on too. People duplicating your content to try and get your copy removed, bogus DMCA claims, etc.

rms 16y ago

I call it the negative SEO bomb. Gain control of a bunch of sites that are hosting viruses, autodownloading exe's, or otherwise performing unlawful hacks on the user. Then start linking to all of the people who rank higher than you. You could pick off all of your pagerank competitors one by one. (this is theoretical, but I don't see why it wouldn't work in a probabilistic sense)

tapp 16y ago
It's more popularly referred to as "Google bowling." A couple years back, Matt Cutts acknowledged that it was possible, though he also stated they have countermeasures making it very difficult to do in practice.

Andrewski 16y ago

"that would be a remarkably stupid way for Google to empower the worst citizens of the web to hold the rest hostage" It is easy to forget that Google is not the Internet. A time goes on, SEO will cause Google to become nearly useless, and people will move onto greener pastures.

nostromo 16y ago

There's a lot of speculation around it. On WebmasterWorld you'll hear stories of people who bought no paid links get delisted because of spammy links. The'll say a competitor bought the links to their website, then reported them to Google for black-hat SEO -- basically setting them up and then turning them in. Of course, this is the first defense anyone would use if they were caught actually link spamming -- so who can tell how common it is. (By the way, I don't see how Google could tell either.) There are rumors of other bad things going on too. People duplicating your content to try and get your copy removed, bogus DMCA claims, etc.