Getting Penalized for Back Links

[ThomPhelps]

I have read much about this topic and wanted to see what others thought.

Can someone linking to you cause your site to be penalized? When some one's site drops in the SERPS I hear people say all the time that maybe your site was penalized because you have "bad" or "spam" websites linking to you.

I know the overwhelming consensus is that this cannot effect your rankings. People say this because if Google penalized you for who links to you then you could easily knock out your competition by getting links from "bad" sites to their website.

I would normally agree with this but, I do know that a huge flood of back links all at once can cause a site to lose rankings. Since this is the case, how easy would it be for someone to just send a huge amount of back links to a competitor's site in a short amount of time and virtually knock them out of rankings?

I look forward to the responses.

[chinmokuyuuki]

I'm in a position to test the scenario you are describing and I did so in the past. The consensus regarding a few 'spammy' links wont hurt is indeed correct. I linked from around 400 'bad' sources to one of my sites just for a test and the rankings dropped a few days later only to come back stronger then ever.

Regarding your actually question: Been there, done that.
Just for some testing I sent over 100,000 mixed backlinks to one of my local niche sites to see what would happen. With mixed backlinks I mean around 50k forum profiles, 40k blog comments, 5k article links, 5k linkwheels and bookmarks.
The target site had a DA of 2 years, 120 BLs and ranked nowhere for the target keyword. The links were created in a time span of 2 weeks.

My hypothesis was that my site would get instant sandboxed for creating that much backlinks in such a short time and it did or so I thought.
2 days after the start of the blast my site was nowhere to be seen in google not even with the site operator. I let the schedule run its course and even after a month the site was nowhere to be seen. I decided to continiously drip some backlinks(around 500 a week) and to my surprise after 3 months off continious backlinking my site suddenly ranked for the target keyword.

Yes my site did get sandboxed. No this was not definite. And yes my site came back stronger then ever. The cost you might ask? Around 3 months of continious linkbuilding effort, over 130,000 backlinks with a price tag of around €500. Worth testing? Yes. Worth repeating? No, in the same timespan you could have set up a slower linkbuilding campaign to get the same results for a lower price tag.

[ThomPhelps]

Thank you chinmokuyuuki!

Great stuff.

Did the local niche site where you sent 100,000 mixed back links stay ranking until this day or has it dropped again?

[chinmokuyuuki]

The website in question is still going strong however not as strong as it used to. Its now on the 2nd page instead of top 3. But this is mostly due to a lack of interest on my part. Interesting to note though is that the backlinks deprecate faster or lose their value faster when built fast. As most of the initial backlinks wont even show up in my backlink reports. The initial blast happened around 6 months ago. All in all it was a great test as any result is better than no result at all.

[Jeremy Banks]

IMO google will never penalize your links but they may count the links towards your ranking, but then after further indexing and crawling discount the weight of those links resulting in a drop in traffic. To most this will appear as a penalty, but it is just the machine at work!

Just keep getting links

Google can't penalize sites for links as this would cause sabotage. They will only penalize a site if they have proof of gaming the search engine like they did with JC Penny

[ThomPhelps]

Originally Posted by chinmokuyuuki

most of the initial backlinks wont even show up in my backlink reports.

That really is a good point. When you do a link blast as you did, how would Google know about it anyway that quickly? It takes them a very long time to find the links doesn't it? Why would it hurt you so quickly?

[chinmokuyuuki]

Almost all of the backlinks I build personally get pinged serveral times untill they get crawled. This way about 50-60% of them gets indexed within 1 - 2 weeks. After pinging I usually create a RSS/XML feed which I upload to me site and link to in my footer. This way each time a crawler visits my site it indexes a couple of backlinks to that site aswell. This is an old trick but most people don't use it.

[ThomPhelps]

Where do you build your RSS feeds?