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I remember seeing a sales page for a backlink generating script a while back, before the penguin update. They had a section with the heading "Can this hurt my t

I remember seeing a sales page for a backlink generating script a while back, before the penguin update. They had a section with the heading "Can this hurt my traffic in any way?" saying something the lines of "Of course not! If it could, your competitors could do this to you to destroy your ranking, and google wouldn't let that happen." Is this obviously not the case anymore? You could easily cause a lot of grief to smaller startup websites by setting up a server to constantly generate spammy links at them. And maybe I should delete this comment before it inspires someone to be a jackass.

joemoon 13y ago
This is called Negative SEO. Matt Cutts discusses the topic here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HWJUU-g5U_I http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H...
- papa_bear 13y ago
  Ah gotcha, I guess that's pretty much all google can do. They also unfortunately validate it as a tactic against people/small companies that wouldn't otherwise realize: 1. They have a bunch of spammy links pointing to them, 2. That the links are negatively affecting them, and 3. They can do something about it. Maybe it would be nice of them to email webmasters to notify them that they're being punished by spammy links, but I guess this would defeat the point of punishing it in the first place (as opposed to just not counting them towards the page rank).
  - joemoon 13y ago
    They actually do send an email alert. I didn't find an authoritative blog post on the subject, but here's a post from a reputable SEO site discussing these email alerts: http://searchengineland.com/google-warning-more-about-bad-link-networks-117079 http://searchengineland.com/google-warning-more-about-bad-li...
- hippich 13y ago
  So essentially he is saying, "do not worry, this is not a problem for you." Just for fun decided to look into inbound links in webmaster tools for my site. Out of 3.3k links almost 3k links with all kind of non-relevant keywords from obviously spammy sites. Not sure why it is done, probably something about google's bot to see legitimate links next to spammed ones.. It is nice they have this new tool to devow links, but it is not linked anywhere from webmaster tools and you can find it only after you watched this youtube post (thank you BTW, just sent request to devow all these spammy links)
Cherian 13y ago
I always thought Google was smart about this and witch-hunts will not have an effect. But seems like that’s not the case. In any case relying on a sing provider for the majority of the traffic with a plan B to survive a disaster is a great learning. One that we always forget when we are sailing the success boat.
tluyben2 13y ago
This is a real issue and it's being taken much too lightly; I think Google should ignore incoming from sites with an over the top [outgoing links to distinct domains]/[original content] ratio. So site directories, those 'how much is my site worth' sites, made for adsense blogs etc. It's very easy to get millions of worthless / spammy links for a site and it does ruin the Google standing. You also cannot mail all of them; a) it would be a fulltime job b) they don't care; they won't remove the links anyway, because that would be a fulltime job for them.
- franze 13y ago
  that's why they developed this tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?p...
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    Yes, but, in my experience, that doesn't work very well; it's still taking them into account. But that could be only my experience, maybe it works for others. It actually says that 'it is not enough' to do that, so what does that mean? A lot of spam-site webmasters pipe their mail to /dev/null, so you cannot remove them.

joemoon 13y ago

This is called Negative SEO. Matt Cutts discusses the topic here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HWJUU-g5U_I http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H...

papa_bear 13y ago
Ah gotcha, I guess that's pretty much all google can do. They also unfortunately validate it as a tactic against people/small companies that wouldn't otherwise realize: 1. They have a bunch of spammy links pointing to them, 2. That the links are negatively affecting them, and 3. They can do something about it. Maybe it would be nice of them to email webmasters to notify them that they're being punished by spammy links, but I guess this would defeat the point of punishing it in the first place (as opposed to just not counting them towards the page rank).
- joemoon 13y ago
  They actually do send an email alert. I didn't find an authoritative blog post on the subject, but here's a post from a reputable SEO site discussing these email alerts: http://searchengineland.com/google-warning-more-about-bad-link-networks-117079 http://searchengineland.com/google-warning-more-about-bad-li...
hippich 13y ago
So essentially he is saying, "do not worry, this is not a problem for you." Just for fun decided to look into inbound links in webmaster tools for my site. Out of 3.3k links almost 3k links with all kind of non-relevant keywords from obviously spammy sites. Not sure why it is done, probably something about google's bot to see legitimate links next to spammed ones.. It is nice they have this new tool to devow links, but it is not linked anywhere from webmaster tools and you can find it only after you watched this youtube post (thank you BTW, just sent request to devow all these spammy links)

Cherian 13y ago

I always thought Google was smart about this and witch-hunts will not have an effect. But seems like that’s not the case. In any case relying on a sing provider for the majority of the traffic with a plan B to survive a disaster is a great learning. One that we always forget when we are sailing the success boat.

tluyben2 13y ago

This is a real issue and it's being taken much too lightly; I think Google should ignore incoming from sites with an over the top [outgoing links to distinct domains]/[original content] ratio. So site directories, those 'how much is my site worth' sites, made for adsense blogs etc. It's very easy to get millions of worthless / spammy links for a site and it does ruin the Google standing. You also cannot mail all of them; a) it would be a fulltime job b) they don't care; they won't remove the links anyway, because that would be a fulltime job for them.

franze 13y ago
that's why they developed this tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?p...
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Yes, but, in my experience, that doesn't work very well; it's still taking them into account. But that could be only my experience, maybe it works for others. It actually says that 'it is not enough' to do that, so what does that mean? A lot of spam-site webmasters pipe their mail to /dev/null, so you cannot remove them.