Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
If this is the case, can't our competition use these tactics to hurt our site rankings ? In the same arena, can't bad link farms and other unscrupulous sites hurt competition by linking to us ?
I cannot believe the "crap" that links to some of my sites, which have been decimated in ranking since June 4th. I've done an extensive review recently, and see a lot of unscrupulous "greybar" sites linking to me. Moreover, I am seeing a lot of sites indexed in Google whose link, when clicked, does a redirect to the home page of a site of mine that has seen a major ranking tanking.
Is this the new wave of destruction ? Is it possible that Google hasn't figured this out yet ?
- The Saboteurs of Search - Part II [webmasterworld.com]
- New Competitor Ranking Attack Method? [webmasterworld.com]
Of course, whether acquiring bad links yourself has the potential for harm is also a widely debated subject. Again, with discussions in the past few months:
- Paid Directory Links Being Targeted? [webmasterworld.com]
- After Effects From Link Campaign - go down before you go up? [webmasterworld.com]
- Can poor backlinks links push sites down the SERPs? [webmasterworld.com]
I doubt there's ever going to be a consensus on this. My take - if your site is established enough and has a solid backlink profile, you're likely to never see any problems. On the flipside, if you're low hanging fruit for sabotage, then you'd be wise to anticipate trouble.
it appears as if Google may be punishing sites that have references from Blogs, forums, bulletin boards
That's way too broad a statement, IMO. What I see Google doing, in some cases, is removing the ability to pass link juice from questionable backlinks.
That's a lot different than punishing the target site, even though either action might cause a drop in rankings. If a site was benefitting from bad backlinks, then that benefit should be removed.Such an action is not a "punishment".
In regard to your:
"New Competitor Ranking Attack Method?"
reference above, I've been seeing an inordinate amount of foreign-based sites in particular (emanating from Russia, Asia, and Italy, to name a few) that have redirect links directly to my sites, even though there is no "content-related" reason for them to do so. Most of these sites are untraceable via WHOIS, although for several of them I was able to obtain an administrative contact, and shot them an Email (to no avail, of course). For several of them hosted by reputatble ISP's (GoDaddy, e.g.), I've shot the ISP vendor an Email to alert them of this funny business.
Sometimes, but not always, these rogue foreign-based links appear ahead of me in the SERPs, for certain keyword phrases. This is what tipped me off, as to potentially being something that has been instrumental in my rankings demise since the infamous June 4th debacle. My somewhat naive guess currently, is that this is a new wave of attack by competitors to push one down in the SERPs. I think Google may have a hole in their linking algorithm and strategy, if this sort of behavior is causing this problem, and it has not been discovered yet by them. That, coupled with their geo-flitering algorithm, may result in a new area of exploitation.
I had an "about" page with names & photos etc. of real people running a popular pr6 website with 30,000+ daily visitors. One of the guys started to link to the about page with his name from the blog comments.
Prior searches on google "web" & "pictures" used to turn back that about page and the photos for each name. Now after commenting on a few blogs just the guy's name is not returning that about page anymore. So the "about" page seems to suffer a penalty from it.
