What is stopping a competitor from intentionally getting my site banned?

[highbrid]

As I understand, if I load my site urls into a blog spammer or a social bookmarking software and go all out crazy with it, i.e. i dunno... 100,000 links a day.. google will ban me, right?

So, what is stopping a competitor from loading my site inte these software programs and spamming the world with a view to getting my site banned?

[Mike Grant]

Won't get you banned, possibly "sandboxed" but that'll only help you in the long run.

[Andrew O]

I haven't heard of a site getting officially "banned" for just inbound links. It almost always has to do with something regarding on-page practices. Or, a combination of linking with on-page activities. But sandboxed, yes, that is a possibility.

[highbrid]

thanks for the clarification guys... and so what exactly getting sandboxed mean / involve?

[InternetSuccess001]

Originally Posted by highbrid

As I understand, if I load my site urls into a blog spammer or a social bookmarking software and go all out crazy with it, i.e. i dunno... 100,000 links a day.. google will ban me, right?

So, what is stopping a competitor from loading my site inte these software programs and spamming the world with a view to getting my site banned?

Actually, not too much. And yes, it does happen. I've personally had to deal with competitors like that.

[Ofthemix]

The Google sandbox is designed to keep new sites from ranking quickly in Google. For example, a brand new site with 1000 backlinks would look very strange. . . because, very likely, not that many sites would link to a brand new site with no organic search traffic.

When a new site gets sandboxed, it simply keeps that site from ranking high for the keywords that have been specified in the inbound links, because those links are likely unnatural. It usually takes Google 3 to 6 months before it starts properly indexing those sites.

I hope that helped. I'm kinda drunk right now so my explaination skills aren't at their best.

[highbrid]

Internetsuccess - may i ask how you dealt with this?

Ofthemix - if drinking makes you that articulate and helpful then perhaps you should consider alcoholism it's 8am in Nepal at the moment and the guy in the guesthouse room next door has already offered me a toke of his wacky tobacky...

[jverley]

I wouldn't really worry about it, unless your site is brand new. (in which case no one should know about it to be able to ..)

Worst case, you get sand boxed, and 3 months down the road you have a boat load of free links/bookmarks/etc from said guy.

[highbrid]

This is interesting....

So if I have a blog, for example, and have no desire nor need for it to rank immediately, I would be better off in the long run to go crazy with the link building paying no attention to whether it appears natural or otherwise??

[mattlaclear]

Google has actually come out and said publicly that the only person who can hurt your site ranking is yourself. So there is no way a competitor could hurt your ranking. My advice is to start jamming back links out and unless you have the keyword as your url don't even look for a ranking for at least 90 days.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by highbrid

So, what is stopping a competitor from loading my site inte these software programs and spamming the world with a view to getting my site banned?

The risk and expense of doing so.

In theory, somebody could do this but, in practice, such moves are more likely to blowback on whoever's doing it in some way.

[InternetSuccess001]

Originally Posted by mattlaclear

Google has actually come out and said publicly that the only person who can hurt your site ranking is yourself. So there is no way a competitor could hurt your ranking. My advice is to start jamming back links out and unless you have the keyword as your url don't even look for a ranking for at least 90 days.

Hi Matt,

Google might have *said* that -- but I know of people ('companies') that actually do actively and effectively do that. In fact, at the moment I have one site that a competitor is doing something precisely along those lines, so am dealing with it at the moment...

[dburk]

Originally Posted by mattlaclear

Google has actually come out and said publicly that the only person who can hurt your site ranking is yourself. So there is no way a competitor could hurt your ranking.

Hi Matt,

Just to clarify this statement a little bit I believe the exact quote from Google is as follows:

“There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

Source: Can competitors harm ranking? - Webmaster Tools Help

Some folks look at the word "almost" and proclaim: "See... your competitor can hurt you."

Anytime I have heard a Google engineer discuss this they cite examples of websites that were hacked or poorly moderated. Yes a competitor can hurt your site if they get past your security features, but promoting your site with spammy links, I've yet to see a credible example of this.

Originally Posted by InternetSuccess001

Hi Matt,

Google might have *said* that -- but I know of people ('companies') that actually do actively and effectively do that. In fact, at the moment I have one site that a competitor is doing something precisely along those lines, so am dealing with it at the moment...

I believe there are companies that will take your money for such a thing, however I remain unconvinced of the effectiveness.

I have personally seen about a dozen such attempts and none of the sites I monitored suffered any rankings decline.

I believe the only thing Google does when they discover spammy links is to devalue those links and in severe cases they may de-index the pages where those links are placed. Since you can control your own website you should not be concerned unless it is your web pages that contain the spammy links.

Google tends to hold you responsible for what is on your own website, not what is placed on websites controlled by others.

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by Ofthemix

The Google sandbox is designed to keep new sites from ranking quickly in Google.

Um. Yeah. Right.

That statement is inane and so out of touch with reality.

What's the sandbox?

The disappointment webmasters feel when Google's stupid algorithms don't appreciate their site. It can't be them so it must be Google's fault.

Paul

[bowdeni]

Originally Posted by AndrewOlson

I haven't heard of a site getting officially "banned" for just inbound links.

Gocompare, twice.

Originally Posted by mattlaclear

Google has actually come out and said publicly that the only person who can hurt your site ranking is yourself.

They did..... a long time ago. Now they changed it to 'almost', as someone else has already corrected.

Originally Posted by Ofthemix

The Google sandbox is designed to keep new sites from ranking quickly in Google.

Love the quote from the FAQ someone put up. There is so much misinformation in this thread it hurts.

[dburk]

Hi Bowdeni,

Drats!

You got my hopes up when you suggested an actual case of a website being banned based on incoming links.

I have been looking for a credible account of this occurring so I could study and test the cause. Unfortunately, when I dug into the details, it turns out that they in fact were not banned but had remained indexed, a simple shift in ranking for a few highly competitive keywords.

This suggests either a tweaking in the algorithm or the devaluing of PR on pages that links to their website, not a ban nor a penalty to their website at all. I guess I'll have to keep looking. Please let me know if you spot a genuine case!

P.S. The "sandbox" is not real, it's an imagined penalty box that webmasters invoke when they don't understand why their web page dropped in rankings.

[Dele]

Originally Posted by highbrid

So, what is stopping a competitor from loading my site inte these software programs and spamming the world with a view to getting my site banned?

The fact that your website is not that of Willie Crawford, Stone Evans nor Allen Says.

[tanay46]

As far as I know, you can't get banned for getting too many links too fast. It is possible that you will disappear from the serps for a bit, but then you will soon reappear at a higher position.

Linking to spammy neighborhoods can however results in drops in serps, maybe even getting banned.

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by highbrid

As I understand, if I load my site urls into a blog spammer or a social bookmarking software and go all out crazy with it, i.e. i dunno... 100,000 links a day.. google will ban me, right?

Um, no. Who told you this crap? Unfortunately this is one of the common pieces of "wisdom" that certain uniformed folks on certain forums (and more and more often, here at WF) like to espouse.

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by tanay46

As far as I know, you can't get banned for getting too many links too fast. It is possible that you will disappear from the serps for a bit, but then you will soon reappear at a higher position.

Bear baited again.

Why on earth does that seem to make sense to so many people?
It sure makes no sense when you sit back and put some thought into
it. The only way you would ever reappear at a higher position, was
to keep building quality links to a quality website. But then, it would
not have dropped off in the first place!

Normal fluctuations are not due to anything mysterious or nefarious.

Paul

[kishor212]

Beating you around may be nothing to them, coz, if you goes, someone else comes, so To get still on the top, your competitor will be trying to improve thier Pageranks and SEO parts rather than Simply thrashing people.

Thrashing people will just give then a freetime until someone else comes up, but SEO allows them to rest peacefully remaining on the top.

Thanks.

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Bear baited again.

Why on earth does that seem to make sense to so many people?
It sure makes no sense when you sit back and put some thought into
it. The only way you would ever reappear at a higher position, was
to keep building quality links to a quality website. But then, it would
not have dropped off in the first place!

Actually, I have seen this many times. For instance, a site is sitting at say #12. After some heaving backlinking for a couple of weeks, it drops to say #112. At this point you actually stop backlinking (which IMHO is the exactly wrong thing to do). But...the site comes back in the middle of page 1 after another week or two (despite no further backlinking). It happens time and time again.

Another example, this one from someone who has corresponding with me via email (and who i've been following with Rank Tracker). The person's site was sitting at #55-60 for the longest time. They did some heavy backlinking, and the site dropped down in the low hundreds. Then, against my advice, they stopped backlinking. the site remained in the low hundreds. Then, about a month ago the site reappeared at #12 with no new backlinks and zero changes to the site. The site has stayed there for the past month.

Of course, the best option would have been to continue backlinking during the whole drop and probably get even higher in the SERPs.

[Groovystar]

Our site wsa moved to a new site and we have no way to 301 from the old one. The old one wasn't on a host we owned and was deleted. I've been having to rebuild our SERPs from nothing, but the first thing we did was get all our existing backlinks that we had any control of, changed over, and contacted sites that were linking to the old site and let them know so within a couple of weeks we had thousands of links now pointing to the new site. I also advertised in a zillion places, all kinds of internet media, and we have not been penalised. We are not for a really competitive niche, though, or one known for spamming. So, I don't know. I do know we haven't done anything at all on site that could be considered dodgy in any way either. And I nor my members spammed any links, we did it all manually and those who decided to link to us have done so willingly. Maybe google picked up the fact that our site has all teh same content as the old one?

Spamming a competitor's site to get it banned is called google bowling, btw :P

[Mike Grant]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Why on earth does that seem to make sense to so many people?

Because it's true.

[searchnology]

Agreed....as others have mentioned it is possible to get sandboxed if the site is fairly new (less than 3 yrs) but nobody can do permanent harm to your site with just backlink spam....imagine the carnage.

Now that doesn't mean they can't post negative information about your site all over the web that rank very well for your keywords but that is not the same thing as harming your site directly with backlink spam.

I hope that helps.

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi Matt,

Just to clarify this statement a little bit I believe the exact quote from Google is as follows:

“There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

Source: Can competitors harm ranking? - Webmaster Tools Help

Some folks look at the word "almost" and proclaim: "See... your competitor can hurt you."

Anytime I have heard a Google engineer discuss this they cite examples of websites that were hacked or poorly moderated. Yes a competitor can hurt your site if they get past your security features, but promoting your site with spammy links, I've yet to see a credible example of this.



I believe there are companies that will take your money for such a thing, however I remain unconvinced of the effectiveness.

I have personally seen about a dozen such attempts and none of the sites I monitored suffered any rankings decline.

I believe the only thing Google does when they discover spammy links is to devalue those links and in severe cases they may de-index the pages where those links are placed. Since you can control your own website you should not be concerned unless it is your web pages that contain the spammy links.

Google tends to hold you responsible for what is on your own website, not what is placed on websites controlled by others.

[searchnology]

I've seen this exact scenario with many sites as well, so I'd say it is rather common. "Google Dance"

As far as I can tell the age of the domain is a heavily weighted factor. Having a domain that is at least 3 years old seems so to be where I started seeing less impact from large backlink campaigns.

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Actually, I have seen this many times. For instance, a site is sitting at say #12. After some heaving backlinking for a couple of weeks, it drops to say #112. At this point you actually stop backlinking (which IMHO is the exactly wrong thing to do). But...the site comes back in the middle of page 1 after another week or two (despite no further backlinking). It happens time and time again.

Another example, this one from someone who has corresponding with me via email (and who i've been following with Rank Tracker). The person's site was sitting at #55-60 for the longest time. They did some heavy backlinking, and the site dropped down in the low hundreds. Then, against my advice, they stopped backlinking. the site remained in the low hundreds. Then, about a month ago the site reappeared at #12 with no new backlinks and zero changes to the site. The site has stayed there for the past month.

Of course, the best option would have been to continue backlinking during the whole drop and probably get even higher in the SERPs.

[webbyworld]

Of course for an aged domain you don't need to worry about the backlinks. For any new domain it's quite unnatural to get lots of backlinks very quickly. So for that case your site get sandboxed but would never get penalized for that. Simply getting lots of backlinks can't make your site banned.

[aftermath]

Sandboxing is a process which Google uses to prevent sites building bunch of links quickly to appear on the search results. This can also happen when your content quality is too low.

Only off-page SEO cant damage your site. Atleast on page SEO is well within your hands right?