How to fight Google penalty due to bad links.

Google penalty, links exchange, bad neighbors,

[abhishekkaushik]

This is evident that sites have been penalized by Google by reducing there PR or completely removal from index. The most common reason being their links were found on the bad the neighbors. To stop this one can do little as there are plenty of automatic link exchange scripts are out there which require no authentication of site ownership, so any of your competitors can pass your link to spam and black listed sites. My question here is how you handle this situations?

[TheSeoDude]

In theory links incoming to your website should not alter your site's rankings in any way as it is considered out of your control.

Indeed, there could be problems. If most or all your incoming links come from comment-spam / bad-neighbours your website can be put under watch.

Start your site slowly, build legit links and fly under the radar. When 'evil' webmasters will notice your site you will have had enough legit links to ensure you will not have any problems and bad links will just be ingored.

I once spammed 150k links for a site of mine, got a pr6 and had no problems until I started to link to those I shouldn't have and got it wasted by Google.

Lately MSN won't even index you if all your initial links are from spam and your domain is new with no previous content, and this is from personal experience.

[nippi]

its far more likely, you have not been penalised for other sites linking to you.

MOre likley

(1) You once got value for these links, now you don't, so your rankings have dropped.

(2) If you have engaged in reciprocal or 3 way links(yes, these are easy as pie to spot) then you've got a problem, if these were for no reason other than rankings.

(3) If you;ve sent out link requests, you've likely got a problem, more and more these are used by google, to determine if your incoming links are genuine, and you can lose google's trust for making requests, that are clearly for rankings reasons only. People do also link for other reasons of course, but when you send out 100,000 emails asking for an exchange as google values incoming links... problem.

[johnlim9988]

(3) If you;ve sent out link requests, you've likely got a problem
?

Really like this? IF only send about 20 emails per day for link requests, will that be a problem? As we checked the sites and think the links are really good for our viewers. Will that be a problem?

Thanks.

[europeforvisitors]

It might be worth doing some background reading in Webmaster World's Link Development Forum:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[TheSeoDude]

He actually asked how he can protect himself from other that will link exchange his site just to get him banned. Right? Or didn't I get it?
Not how to do proper link exchange.

[mirrornl]

welcome dude :)

[TheSeoDude]

Well... thank you! ;)

[tedster]

I think one line of protection would be having a Webmaster Tools account for your domain. If you suspect someone else's mischief is hurting you, that way you have an authenicated and trusted way to communicate with Google about it.

[trinorthlighting]

My take, if you have been busted for a link exchange and its out of control, you might want to consider starting a new site. If you build a new site with all your i's dotted and your t's crossed, you can have it ranking in less than 3 months.

Some penalties can last 6 months (-30) or a year or even more. Its a big decision, but if we took over a site that has that penalty, we would probally start from scratch.

[europeforvisitors]

I think one line of protection would be having a Webmaster Tools account for your domain. If you suspect someone else's mischief is hurting you, that way you have an authenicated and trusted way to communicate with Google about it.

Another line of protection is to have a site that passes the sniff test on other fronts, on the theory that "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck even if it has questionable inbound links from ersatz duck sites."

[TheSeoDude]

If your site has no bad outbound links I don't think you will be having problems due to inbound links unless these bad incoming links are almost all you have.

I've seen old sites spammed like crazy with tens of thousands of inbound links from just about anywhere ranking great even on the spam.

So if your site has an age and some links they should not touch you. Those links will just be ingored, or even work in your favour, even if they will be weighted way lower than legit ones from same theme pages.

Solutions like build another site and wait x months or contact Google about link attacks are totally unrealistic and maybe work on Mars where Google might give a d4mn. You do not have time and Google cares less about you than you can imagine.

If you hoped to get an answer here on how to avoid banning when starting a new site only with spammed links, I have bad news for you. Sites go down faster and faster. Unless you have some excellent content generation tool that won't trip the duplicate content filters and you only have good outgoing links, your are on your way down. I'm also 99% sure that Google checks some basic grammar and word order to decide if your site is good (readable) or not. And this one is easy doable. (I code and I know what I say)

[mattg3]

So if your site has an age and some links they should not touch you. Those links will just be ingored, or even work in your favour, even if they will be weighted way lower than legit ones from same theme pages.

I have a 10 year old PR 6 site with IBL on topic since 10 years all organic (and therefore not that many IBLs, since I never did any link building) which recently got mass IBL spammed from a spam domain network and 950ed dropped. IBLs are at 1/3 of total links. A similar site in english PR5 that has also links since 1997 that is unaffected by spammy IBLs.

So your statement is _possibly_ not acurate. I have PR 6 and 5 shown through all my subsections yet it still gets dumped.

As the drop coincided with some Google announcement about some link buyer crusade it seems possible that one can indeed get caught up in someone killing your site.

[abhishekkaushik]

Some of you have cited about link request can be dangerous. When somebody send the link request by secure email I don't understand how Google is going to figure out this.

[trinorthlighting]

If that link request is reported as spam to google, that can kill you. There are many ways to get very good and powerful links. Write articles, how to do's, etc.. and post them in the right places. Just make sure what you are writing about is relevant and it will help the end user out.

[TheSeoDude]

Mattg3 - I talk about common sense and personal experience in spamming and being spammed;)

You might be right, but, if that happens, we should all just train for alternative jobs.

I'll do some tests and nuke some sites see what happens ;) but I don't think you can take a good old site down that easy. If so, Google coders should come to me for some training in both algo and logic and spiritual guidance.

Cheers.