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I don't know how these illegal link trades work because I'm new to SE trades. I'm guessing here that my competitors submited my domain name to these illegal link exchange programs. Is it possible for my competitors to do that? I suspect that google is going to punish me at the next update. Please help me.
We generally stay away from posting direct urls to "problem" sites (we always get into trouble when we do - not the google spam reporting desk don't cha know)...
Anyway, we've had a few discussions about this very topic before. The general consensus, is that you will not be harmed by the inbound links. As long as you don't link to any of those sites, you can't suffer. That wasn't always the case, but it is now.
I don't know whether these links has caused my site to be penalized, but it seems so because when I searched my company name, it ended #30+. Previously it was ranked top ten for many of the keywords and I have not changed anything on my website, except some minor update on the product information.
Hope GoogleGuy can help solve this, if not this kind of sabotaging could escalate into war.
KLite/Kaycee, I'm not sure what you're saying. Somebody was nice enough to sign hundreds of guestbooks for you? Seems like a nice favor to me. :)
If these guestbooks links do have penalty, then I think there's something very wrong. Remember that our competitors can always get thousand of illegal guestbook links to "kill" us.
I really hope there is actually NO guestbook link penalty and I will try hard believe it. Meantime, I'll concentrate to learn more from this forum and optimized the my website by building better content and quality links, and see the update in Google next month, praying hard for better ranking results.
Google has smart people there - they know that if the penalized people for guestbook submissions, FFA Links, and oversubmitting to their url page - that everyone and their mother would be doing this to their competitors.
Look at the little smily face toolbar - I am sure they were sitting down at the Googleplex laughing their butts off as people voted for their page and against everyone else for the same keyword. I am convinced the only reason for those buttons is to provide amusement for the engineers.
You always have to think like google:
WWGD?
What Would Google Do?
If you belong to a program like Links2U - then you will have a file on your site that has hidden links to 1,000s of sites. Google doesn't like this - AND they can tell YOU did it, because it is on YOUR site.
Same with cloaking. You can't cloak someone elses site (not without hacking them).
If google wanted to penalize guestbook links - what would they do? The only LOGICAL thing to do would be to zero out the PR or delete this page from the index. This way the people on it would get no credit - but would not be hurt. It would be as if they never existed on that page.
Google is where they are today, because they have smart people working there. We have words for search engines that don't fit this category - they rhyme with schmaltavista and sphinktomi.
The internet works well BECAUSE of its hyperlink structure - 99% of the links out there are not from hyperlink trades. You should feel glad when someone links your site.
This is normal. I am suprised that Google would block your site with safe search on because of it, but I guess that would be possible. I did a search of sites I know in guestbooks that are considered "similar" to adult sites, but of a non adult nature. They came up fine either way. I just don't get why competitors would add people to guestbooks.
Personally I do not think guestbook links are bad, I was just stating that Google should not count the page if they decide they are.
It does not appear to affect over all ranking. I know plenty of #1 sites that are similar in competitive categories.
This would be interesting as it WOULD BE A PENALTY that your competitor could cause.
I do not know how many people use the safe search feature. Some of my non adult sites are blocked it looks like with safe search (scared the dickens out of me as I forgot I had left safe search on and thought my site was gone :) ). I still do fine with them and am not concerned.
I can't say for sure this is the reason that these sites are blocked (I am too swamped right now to check into it properly), but if I had to guess, I would say you are right about the similar pages causing the site to be blocked with safe search on. Just an educated guess. I DO NOT think it affects ranking with it off.
Is there now a definitive answer to: Does signing guestbooks at high PR, related sites create a problem in google or other SEs? Or create any benefit?
Does text in the guest book consting of "blah blah <b><link>keyword</link></b> blah" create a problem?
Some time after this thread started Google started to ignore links from pages featuring the word guestbook heavily (even the ODP category). The timing was presumably coincidental.
Google counts those links again now. Guestbook spamming doesn't normally help PR much, as guestbooks tend to be deep in the site, they often have URLs that are unappealing to bots, and high PR sites tend not to have them.
maybe those guestbook-links etc. did exist all the time and you only got aware of them when your rankings dropped..
i think this because guestbook-links where much more valuable in the past and they could have helped your rankings tremendously.
and now as theyre downgraded they appear to be the problem..
this safe-search is another thingie. maybe google takes the most important inboud-links to estimate "safety".
i think all this should be no problem having some good inbound link like google or yahoo..
At least in terms of googlebot crawling the site. I am assuming that guestbooks don't harm, though.
If it helps my site has a PR6 homepage even though it only has a few inbound links. Majority of those links are guestbook but have high PR & are relevant. So for me I'd say it has been a good simple solution to PR. The tradeoff is that my inbound junk mail has gone up 300%.
The tricky bit, of course, is taking advantage of that PR by getting content up there that people attracts people.
Tigrou
Of course, your site has to have relevant content to justify the links.
I checked your site - the pr6 you have is because you had a link from pr7 page in dmoz.
However, I also see that your earler category in dmoz has now changed to one which is pr5. I think google will do a recalculation for your page shortly.
If an inbound link themes your site as adult or unsafe, and as a consequence you don't appear in searches, this is bad. If Google's algo takes into account what category your site is listed in, and disallows an adult attribution to your site, well that would be reassuring. But I haven't read anything here to that effect. So I remain disturbed.
:o Y
