Can I Get Penalized for Who Links at My Site?

There's an interesting discussion going on about this topic on the most important italian SE forum these days. The position of the majority of the members there is: "you cant be penalized if a bad site links to you".

The problem is nobody can show evidence. I'm asking to a broader audience here: have you experienced a penalization due to bad backlinks? In this case are you sure no link chain existed between your site and the site you received bad links from. I mean: If site B is bad, have you linked to site C which links to site B?

Of course they remove some sites for manipulating their relevancy scores. Some of them they remove are removed for buying too many links.

What is to stop me from buying a competitor a bunch of obvious paid links and getting them nuked from Google? Sites of real brands gain trust and can get away with more, but if your content quality is not that great and you do not have much of a brand it is easy to make you look like an aggressive link buyer and get your site nuked.

And even with the relevancy algorithms it is all mathematical ratios anyway...what is the good to bad link ratio, etc.

Does your site look like a natural part of the web? If not it may be demoted or penalized.

Hi farDesi
Do you have many citations from local areas? Where is your site hosted? Do you link out to any local sites? Do you have your address on multiple pages of your website?

Generally rather than trying to lose quality natural citations I would try to figure out why people gave them to me and then look for ways to get more local people to want to do the same. Also hosting locally, linking out locally, getting local links, and putting your address on your site can help search engines understand where your site belongs.

No, you cant be penalized if a bad site links to you but you can get penalized if you link to a bad site.

Akash Kumar

Hi Akash
You shouldn't be selling SEO services if you believe that.

Hello:

Your article about being penalized by who links to your website is stimulating.

I am aware that all the Search engines, especially Google and SEO gurus talk about theme based linking , meaning that you should only link to websites who have similar contents to yours.

On the surface this looks like a great idea, but when you think about it seriously, it is very childish, moronic and silly.

It is like saying: all doctors should only network with and do business with other doctors, all engineers should only network and do business with other engineers, and all carpenters should only network and do business with other carpenters, and all prostitutes should network and do business with only other prostitutes, and all search engines should network with and do business with only other search engines.

If this theme based linking strategy is to be applied to Google search engine who advocates this, it will go out of business in 24 hrs.

Is Google and all the search engines and gurus who advocate this silly strategy linking and doing business with only the other search engines?

Is Google linking, networking and doing business with only other search engines?

The answer is NO!

So, while this advice may be good and profitable to the advisors, it may be poisonous to the websites and companies who implement it.

This is common sense

What is wise is to diversify your linking, so that you can spread your sources of traffic as widely as possible.

Some of the traffic you get from your links may not be targetted and they may not buy your product at the moment.

But they may bookmark your website and in the future when they need your product, they will come back and buy from you.

I have had customers who book marked my website and came back and bought from me after 2 yrs! It was hilarious when they told me that!

So cast your net for traffic far and wide so as to get maximum expsoure.

Success in internet promotion is about traffic, exposure and networking.

If a competitor had the money (and was evil enough to do to it), they could do the following -- Pay for thousands and thousands of backlinks to their competitor's website until Google picked up on it and threw them out of their results. It's as simple as that. Google would think that they were spamming their engine, and would penalize them.

Why would someone stupid enough to help competitor build links to rank good in yahoo and msn.

Some blackhats have thousands of spam sites and could place a million links at you overnight.

The most dangerous links are between your own sites if you do heavy cross linking within your own network or if you have banned or penalized sites linking in. A devilish competitor could registser a batch of domains in YOUR name, lace them with hidden text, keyword spam and your adsense code, then link them into your network. They can find out where your sites are hosted and a phone call will get the new sites on the same ip block. Total cost: a few hundred dollars - cheaper than buying links and possibly more effective.

I redirected your link to spam.com instead of the MLM page you were linking at.

I don't think all good links are necessarily incestuous in nature. A banker can link to a currency exchange site and they are both dealing with money. Relating topics are...related.

You have to think more in terms of topical relationships and how things fit together...not just how a micro niche is structured.

For example, Danny Sullivan is at the top of the search engine marketing social sphere in large part because he is a guru of search.

The most authoritative people who link at SEW are not usually linking and voting to push SEO or SEM. They are usually voting for search.

Even people outside your sphere can link at you if they are interested in what you have to say, but most aggressive manual link building techniques do not involve creating value, being relevant, and filling market demand. Most of them revolve around pushing shit, like bogus MLM programs that rely on using bogus anchor text on others blogs to push their untargeted marketing system. And of course there is a true and finite cost in terms of time and money to spur up demand for anything.

The value in search (and in web publishing as a whole) is filling market demand. You can only go so far with artificial techniques. If at some point you don't work at brand building than your marketing spend is usually going to be improperly balanced and your returns are going to be less than they could be.

Hi Aaron,

Could you elaborate more on canonicalization. You said that...

In that regard probably the best way to protect your site from competitive sabotage is to ensure you don't have domain canonicalization issues (ie: engines realize www.site.com and site.com are the same) and work hard to build legitimate signs of trust.

How does canonicalization effect 301 redirects from domain.com to www.domain.com?

I could be wrong, but didnt something like this happen to www.seoinc.com ??

Someone else got a C&D for posting on what happened to SEO Inc., so I would prefer not to comment too heavily on their position at this point.

At some point I believe that link quality issues may have hurt them though (although I am uncertain as to who bought the links, etc.).

OH, sorry about that! I dont want you or myself to get one of those. Its just I was at the SES NEW YORK 06 a couple weeks back and talked with a guy from SEO INC (in the expo area) about it and he would'nt even go into it to much detail but so I guess its still sensitive issue!! Sorry!

Latley one of my sites got quite a few links from UK domains. Boy did I slide in the Canadian and US searches... but got a boost in google.co.uk. Too bad I don't sell in UK. What is the best way to get my self off these sites. Contacting the site owners did not work.

I had a website that a former employer tried to do negative seo on and it ended up backfiring on him and shot it straight to the top. These were techniques i would never try, however it did go against him and took my client to #1 in a very competitive market. My suggestion, don't do it!