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Worsening your PR by "bad" inbound linking?

         

pawel

12:46 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I found anrticle warning against getting involved in linking schemes. It says getting inbound links from poor pages, and especially those already banned by the GoogleBot, can lower your PageRank. Is it that inbound links from sites with lower PR than that your site already has will **lower** your PR?
If this really is the case, following this sort of thinking leads to the conclusion that one should try to get links only from pages with higher PR than their site?

takagi

1:06 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Getting links wouldn't decrement the PR. Exchanging links can. In this [webmasterworld.com] thread, GoogleGuy wrote

It's something that a competitor could do to another company, so our automatic scoring doesn't use it.

pawel

2:53 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



>Getting links wouldn't decrement the PR

So you mean it won't decrement the PR, it's 'just' that linking schemes and/or excessive guestbook signing creating 'fake' links to a site could result in getting penalized by google and having your site banned, correct?

takagi

3:04 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



1. Google might ignore links from guestbooks (no extra PR, no penalty)
2. Exchanging links with bad neighborhood (link farms etc) or excessive linking between several sites could cause a penalty.
3. Links from other sites (out of your control) shouldn't hurt you.

trillianjedi

3:05 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Correct?

Nope!

Even excessive guestbook spamming is something that a competitor could do to you.

The only way to get banned through links is for *you* to link to a "bad neighbourhood" - that means a bad or penalised site.

Inbound links of any nature can do you no harm for the very reasons googleguy has stated.

TJ

sanuk

5:38 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi,

and how to know this is a penalized site?

If I am writing a page about very "Specialized Widgets" and while doing so I refer to other pages on the net about these Widgets, how can I know that these pages are penalized?

Or even worse. . .how can I know they will get penalized in the future?

Do we need to examine the source code of every page we link to and then re-check this code every week?

It has arrived that I linked to a page about widgets. The owner of the website didn't renew his domain name and a purely S..word site bought the domain name because it had good traffic.
This S..word domain spams his pages with hidden text.
This happens a lot with expired domains.

Regards,
Sanuk

rfgdxm1

6:49 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



No pawel. Adding the site of a competitor, or someone you just don't like, to hundreds or thousands of FFA pages, guestbooks, etc. is trivial. If Google did this as policy, people would be doing this against the competition on a massive scale. Hell, anyone out there got a link farm of sites that Google whacked with a PR0? With this Google policy they you advertise that you'll add competitor's URL to all the sites in their link farm to hose them.

trillianjedi

7:30 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



sanuk,

That's the dilemma, but the truth is a really good resource on the internet is unlikely to be playing dirty tricks and got banned.

If a reputable source, go with it. If they have good PR and are fine in the SERPS they're probably OK.

If in any doubt, put in the link via javascript to make it invisible to the spiders.

TJ

rfgdxm1

11:35 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



General belief sanuk is that it takes multiple links to "bad neighborhoods" (nobody known the number) to get a penalty. If you think for a second, if it was only one link, then any page linking to that gets penalized, and next every page linking to those... Much of the web could go PR0 if that is the way it worked. Plus, it makes sense to penalize only for excessive dirty links on the theory just a few might be accident, but a lot indicates a dishonest site.

WebGuerrilla

11:51 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>>Inbound links of any nature can do you no harm for the very reasons googleguy has stated.

I hate to pop the bubble here, but that isn't entirely correct. Regardless of what any Google employee has said, there have been sites that have received the PR0 death penalty based soley on inbound links.

It isn't something that happens on a regular basis, but it has happened.

BigDave

11:51 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



sanuk,

I have linked to penalized sites with no ill effects. Do not worry about what would happen if only one or two of your links go bad. Just be careful that you don't let things get out of hand.

kaled

11:56 pm on Jun 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The bottom line surely is this. If you only link to sites that you genuinely believe visitors might find useful AND you don't try silly things like heavily repeated links on the same page (or have pages stuffed with dodgy links and nothing else) there is not much chance of upsetting Google.

The thresholds for such triggers are probably high enough to make unfair bans very unlikely. I'm a relatively new member but I don't recall seeing anyone claim that they had been unfairly banned because of links. Yes, one or two people have asked if their PR is zero because of links but that is different. My site is still showing all zeros but one area is showing better search results than ever before, so I haven't been banned.

Kaled.

rfgdxm1

2:24 am on Jun 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>I hate to pop the bubble here, but that isn't entirely correct. Regardless of what any Google employee has said, there have been sites that have received the PR0 death penalty based soley on inbound links.

Were these cases perhaps where the linking sites could positively be determined to share a common ownership? Such as revealed by whois records or such? The context mentioned here was something like adding URLs to FFA pages, guestbooks, etc. which is so trivial a competitor could do it with a bot while he slept. I'd hope that Google would give the death penalty for inbound links unless the owner of that site could be provably part of some scam.

mil2k

6:09 am on Jun 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I hate to pop the bubble here, but that isn't entirely correct. Regardless of what any Google employee has said, there have been sites that have received the PR0 death penalty based soley on inbound links

Did those sites have inbound links from good sites also? If yes then it's very interesting. :)

trillianjedi

7:50 am on Jun 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I hate to pop the bubble here, but that isn't entirely correct. Regardless of what any Google employee has said, there have been sites that have received the PR0 death penalty based soley on inbound links.

There are always exceptions to the rule. But the rule remains the same, especially in the context of the original post.

They key is whether or not the inbound links are within the control of the link-receiving sites webmaster.

Perhaps I can re-phrase it:-

"Google will not penalise a site for actions which could have been taken by a member of the public and are not within the control of the sites webmaster".

TJ

percentages

8:14 am on Jun 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



>I hate to pop the bubble here, but that isn't entirely correct. Regardless of what any Google employee has said, there have been sites that have received the PR0 death penalty based solely on inbound links.

WG I have never disagreed with a single post of yours....but on this occasion I just don't see it. If you want to sticky me with an example I might get convinced. But right now I see no evidence to suggest that a large number of PR0 incoming links has any detrimental effect whatsoever.

rfgdxm1

8:19 am on Jun 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



And to follow up on what percentages posted WG, when was the last time Google penalized a site solely on the basis of inbound links? If quite a while ago, policy may have changed.

sanuk

8:58 am on Jun 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi,

reading all the above, does this mean that, in the event that Google would penalize, some one from Google would first have a look at the site?

Or is this penalizing for bad "inbound" and "outbound" links completely done with Non-Human interference?

Regards,
Sanuk

pawel

12:01 pm on Jun 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



sanuk,
from what I read a page gets penalized only after Google people have taken a close look at it. So, the scenario is: (1) page is marked by the bot as suspicious, (2) GG people look at it and all the pages in the domain, (3) they penalize it or decide not to.
However, in this thread [webmasterworld.com] I was trying to find out the difference between *penalizing* pages and *banning* sites ( or domains - not cleat yet).As you can see, we're not quite sure on this yet..