Do shady backlinks actually damage ranking?
-
That is, it looks like a whole bunch of sites got smacked around the penguin/panda updates, but is this by virtue of actually being hurt by google's algorithms, or by virtue of simply not being helped "as much"?
That is, was it a matter of the sites just not having any 'quality' backlinks, having relied on things google no longer liked, which would result in not having as much to push them to the top? That is, they would have been in the same position had they not had those shoddy practices?
Or was google actively punishing those sites? That is, are they worse off for having those shoddy practices?
I guess the reason I ask is I'm somewhat terrified of going "out there" to get backlinks -- worst case scenario: would it just not do much to help, or would it actually hurt?
Thanks!
-
Well, for one, someone mentioned guest-posting. But then, guest-posting where? What if the blog is iffy? Would PA/DA give a solid indication of this kind of thing?
Or, for example, I know to stay away from "buy 40 bajillion backlinks for $3" and such, but what about an offer for an individual backlink from a high PR page, manually added potentially in the context of a guest post? Part of me thinks "okay, seems reasonable", but part of me thinks "if this is being offered then could the fact that it's being offered to others then pose an issue based on the appearance of high volume"?
Also: if there is the potential for "negative" SEO, wouldn't this be easily abusable? What's to stop me from blasting 60000 backlinks to one of my competitors?
-
Yes, Google has a number of penalties that actively hurt or de-indexes websites with shady links.
Just focus on getting backlinks that would be useful to people actually visiting those websites. If a human found your link, would they respect you for it? That's the question you should ask when you build links.
-
Hi Yonatan Stratievsky
I would suggest you to avoid the bad links. I had a site which was hitted hard because the owner use cheap paid links. For me the best links are this which I am extracting from the site explorer. Plus the natural links from the visitors. Another good technique is guest posting.
I hope that this helps
Regards Nik
-
Its all speculation at the moment, so the fear mongering is rampent.
In short, yes, bad backlinks can have a negative effect on your site, but it depends on how well established your site is. Negative SEO is real, but depending on the severity of the dodgy links, google just discredits them and asks you to get rid of them, rather than slapping you with a penalty.
When you say, you are afraid of "going out there" what is is that you are afraid of? Just don't be manipulative, get links on relevant websites and you have nothing to worry about. Just forget about trying to manipulate rankings, build relationships with other webmasters, after all, 1 great link is better than 50 suspect / low value links that take hours to "build"
-
There is a lot I can say on this subject but I am going to sum it up in one sentence.I know it’s a generic answer but that’s kind of a generic question
Google can and will penalize (punish) websites for breaking any of their rules that they deem worthy of doing so.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is a recent hack or the disavow tool causing my alarming dropping in rankings!
My business site has been very successful organically for many years. Just recently we got hit with a spam hack and it was resolved within 3 days. However now my rankings are plummeting and I am so stressed out! So here is some timeline information any info would help: Sept. 4th hack first detected on Google Sept. 7th site completely clean, reconsideration accepted, spam content and links removed. Manual actions cleared. Rankings at this time have not been affected. Sept. 11th disavowed a few incoming links that were completely spam. (In hindsight I know this could have been the beginning of the end using this tool) Sept. 21st start to notice first significant drop in rankings and I went into GWT and downloaded latest 1000 links, I realized ALL of these were either hacked sites as well with spam content linking to our now delete spam content or inappropriate adult content. Sept. 22 Disavowed the 1000 domains (there are still probably 1000-2000 more) As of today rankings have SIGNIFICANTLY dropped, I have resubmitted sitemaps, image sitemaps, fetch and rendered as google. I'm stressing out incredibly and feel like I have made an error and that my site will never recover. I've worked using ALL white hat seo and the site used to rank very well top of page one for almost all my keywords. I feel lost and don't know what else I can do - and I know many say wait but it feels like forever. Is it possible that I didn't make a mistake using the disavow and that Google just took a while to penalize for the hack? Please any advice or experiences I would love to hear and appreciate so much anyone who takes the time to respond.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seounicorn0 -
Substantial drop in organic traffic and keyword rankings
My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information. KDc8dMp fyVtrYo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kheberger0 -
Ever seen this tactic when trying to get rid of bad backlinks?
I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre. Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com. One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/... So when I visit http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on. And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com. So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Patrick_G0 -
How cloudflare might affect "rank juice" on numerous domains due to limited IP range?
We have implemented quite a few large websites onto cloudflare and have been very happy with our results. Since this has been successful so far, we have been considering putting some other companies on CL as well, but have some concerns due to the structure of their business and related websites. The companies run multiple networks of technology, review, news, and informational websites. All have good content (Almost all unique to each website) and rankings currently, but if implemented to cloudflare, would be sharing DNS and most likely IP's with eachother. Raising a concern of google reducing their link juice because it would be detected as if it was coming from the same server, such as people used to do for their blog farms. For example, they might be tasked to write an article on XYZ company's new product. A unique article would be generated for 5-10 websites, all with unique, informative, valid and relevant content to each domain; Including links, be it direct or contextual, to the XYZ product or website URL. To clarify, so there is no confusion...each article is relevant to its website... technology website- artciel about the engineering of xyz product
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MNoisy
business website - How xyz product is affecting the market or stock price
howto website - How the xyz product is properly used Currently all sites are on different IP's and servers due to their size, but if routed through cloudflare, will Google simply detect this as duplicate linking efforts or some type of "black hat" effort since its coming from cloudflare? If yes, is there a way to prevent this while still using CL?
If no, why and how is this different than someone doing this to trick google? Thank you in advance! I look forward to some informative answers.0 -
RD and PA high but still not ranking
We picked up a client who before ourselves was just using link building as their SEO strategy. They came to us for on page SEO and overall guidance. We have done some targeted link building and did some work with their link building company to remove some links, however after doing some further diggings Im wondering if we still have some bad links? My reasoning for this is:- all the SEO work we have done on the pages are getting A reports in Moz (which is our back up check) the RD and PA for many of the pages we have focused on are higher RDs and PA's than the pages that rank on the first page Any suggestions?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SocialB1 -
Need help please with website ranking problem!
I am currently struggling with our site www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk to rank our PVC banners page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html On the UK search I have the following positions. hfe-signs.co.uk/banners.php
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson
signfirm.com/banners.html
bigvaluebanners.co.uk/PVC_Banners_High_Quality_Cheap_Outdoor_PVC_Mesh_Full_Colour_Banner/
bannerprintingandroid.co.uk/pvc-banners/
printedbannersandsigns.co.uk/
your-print.co.uk/pvc-banners-special.html
bannerbuzz.co.uk/pvc-banners
bannerbuzz.co.uk/
auraprint.co.uk/products/banners/
vinylprinting.co.uk/pvc_banners.html
banners.co.uk/CustomBanners-BlankBanners.htm
use - http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html I can't decide if it is url structure of the site, to many links on the left hand nav diluting power, keywords, etc but it does not look right that we are so far down, at least 2 of the pages above us have no content at all and some have no links or social either. Any help would be appreciated.0 -
Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking - No Idea Why
Hi Mozzers, I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all. Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week. Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected. Suggestions? Advice? Answers? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky0 -
Hits in H1 will improve ranking by regular crawling ?
Hello ! I was wondering if it's a good idea to keep the "Hits" in the H1 ? http://www.ibremarketing.com/item/netapp-e5400-storage-system.html Will Google come to check regularly the update (new information if I'm right) or if he will not like the idea to come back just for hits update. As I have very good results on this part of the website, I do not want to take any risk. Thanks a lot !
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AymanH0