One Way Links - Penalty

Link Nuke Your Competition?

[kidder]

Is it possible to get hit with a Google penalty for gaining inbound links quickly on an established site? Recips links I can understand will get you sandboxed but if you can sandbox a 3 year established site just by generating a bunch of off topic one way links then things are pretty bad. Site A wants to remove site B so they can in effect use linking as weapon against the competition. The reason for this question is one of first hand experience - looks like one of our sites has dropped off the charts altogether and we have noticed a big jump in reported backlinks - The links are coming in from articles and blogs etc so we have moved from a minimal linking situation in just a few months to a more proactive marketing strategy. Looks like this may have hurt this particular site - My question ramains if an inbound link penalty does apply? then this seems like and easy easy way to torpedo your competition and so gives webmasters a very negative and dangerous tool to play with. It does not matter how I got the links because if it exists it can be exploited, if it can be used to hurt another site then the alog is way way wrong.

[SEOPTI]

This is not sandbox, it's another penalty.

[kidder]

Ok so it's a penalty that can be exploited. So if you make it appear that there is un natural linking taking place then you have the power to get a site to slide in the rankings. To me it's very negative. Fair enough devalue the links but if you penalise you open up a whole new bigger uglier problem.

[CainIV]

Looks like this may have hurt this particular site

It's very hard to predict lately what has effected sites in Google. It could that any particular application of algo could have been the reason for the slide.

[tedster]

I've seen people try this and end up only helping their competitor by doing their link-building work for them. I'm not saying there's absolutely not some potential for mayhem here, but I agree with CainIV on the issue. It's not easy to predict what would happen, and I have definitely seen cases where such an attempt backfired.

[wanderingmind]

I suppose the algos would get into a twist if a rival adds a few hundred or thousands of links, and removes them after Google indexes them, leading to some kind of downfall in real PR, and then instantly add them all back again, and repeat a few times for good measure!

[walkman]

sure tedster, but with links as cheap as $50 a month, depending on the field and how much of a scum the person is, they can try.

I don't like this; google should at most ignore the links.

[martinibuster]

>>>google should at most ignore the links.

That's what they say they're doing.

If a site is ranking well because of purchased links, and the links are subsequently neutralized, the site has not been penalized. It's merely ranking where it should be ranking.

[kidder]

Then we can only hope it is not a penalty, it's takes the control out of a webmasters hands right or wrong. This could be a whole new & nasty business model in the making.... How many people would pay to have sites above them "removed" for unnatural linking? 5,000 inbound links about fishing to a property site is never going to help now is it? But it might just hurt!

[soapystar]

except these days the algo is not focussed on particular elements..its the interaction between elements that has become important..and how a single element affects you is very dependant on how you have used other elements....while its very easy to say if we dont trust this big rise in backlinks we will not use it for ranking or relevance purposes when your simply removing one single factor in the scoring.. but I wonder how easy it is to remove its affect in the big soup....

[CainIV]

Even if the site were penalized initally, it is most likely (from what I have experienced) that you would be inevitably helping the site gain better positions over time, especially if those links were optimized or left in place.

Seems like a heck of a lot of work for one company to try considering they could be using those resources to build their own partnerships

[kidder]

So my vanished site may one day return with better rankings?

Link: operator command shows more than 20 times the amount of back links of the top ranking sites in my area. So relevant some not so - but you can't always control who and how people will link to you when you distribute content.

[Alex70]

Goodmorning everybody,

22. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes information relating to behavior of links over time; and wherein the generating a score includes: determining behavior of links associated with the document, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on the behavior of links associated with the document.

23. The method of claim 22, wherein the behavior of links relate to at least one of appearance and disappearance of one or more links pointing to the document.

This come from "United States Patent Application",

[kidder]

When you have consistant rank for a few years then all of a sudden get displaced by scraper or spam sites - You start to think well I need to do something here to remedy this. Maybe a few links or some SEO.... Then you trip a penalty and your gone. There are far too many legit webmasters getting caught in friendly fire and the smart ones will find a way to turn this whole thing on it's ear. The tighter you squeeze something in your fist to contain it the more things escape through the cracks.