Backlinks to/from the SPAM sites can hurt your site?????

1.) How can you 100% pinpoint that your rankings were affected by incoming links? There are 100s of factors out there that determine ranking, and unless it was a controlled experiment, than you can't really say that your decline in ranking was a result of bad links.

2.) So, whats to stop me from going and buying links from sites earmarked as spammers to my competition? Following that logic, I'd be set.

3.) You ask have their been cases where link sales sites have been completely de-indexed. Yes, those sites that facilitate link sales and sell links themselves could of course be de-indexed. But not the websites that they were linking to.

All of that is just silly. If Google allowed us to 'penalize' our competition, it would be total war in the SERPS.

And your link to webmaster tools links to something about choosing the www or non www of your site. Not anything about the guidelines which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=35769

Hi Brad,

Obviously different people have different opinions on it. I like your opinions/experience on many subjects, I just think you are off base on this.

First, actual experience aside. Let's look at this from a logical standpoint. If site A could harm site B by throwing "bad" backlinks at it, and it actually worked, the whole SEO world, and Google's search engine rankings, would go to absolute sh*t. Matt Cutts has even stated that except in absolutely extraordinary cases, a competitor can't hurt your rankings. Based upon followup to that posting, most read the "extraordinary" situation to be something "off-the-wall", like someone hacking into your site. Clearly, if a competitor hacked into your site and put in some outgoing links to bad neighborhood sites, then in that situation, a competitor could hypothetically hurt your site. Basically these are the types of situations that no normal person would lose sleep over.

Again, I just can't get over the position that incoming links can hurt from a pure logical standpoint. It just doesn't make one iota of sense.

As for webmaster tools, their statements reflect how they want webmasters to behave. In many cases, their statements, in my experiences, are just flat out wrong. For instance, it has been my experience that if I have a page on my site that I want to rank for "Matt Cutts needs to hit the gym", my best ranking would occur if 100% of my anchor texts have "Matt Cutts needs to hit the gym." That is, varying anchor text dilutes the link power that you are getting and you will not optimize your SEO efforts splitting up the anchor text.

Does this go against Wemaster guidelines? Sure. But, I do what works, not how Matt Cutts tells me I should act. Too many people blindly follow this like it is some sort of gospel.

As for the links "from" bad neighbor hood sites, I would love the link to that at Webmaster tools (as that would contract what Matt cutts has said). Tim has already provided the quote about outgoing links, but would love to see the mention of backlinks.

In any event, the Webmaster tools are meant to help Google control how the Web operates. Google would tell everyone that it is better to have a "www" in the domain rather than not (even if there is no difference), if Google just thought it looked prettier with the "www."

As for paid links, again the problem comes down to proof. How does Google know they are paid, and how does Google know that the website owner is the one that placed them? Sure, I have read a few stories about sites getting wacked for buying paid links, but my issue is that (1) there really very few facts presented (in particular, there is one story of a site that has been quoted hundreds of times, including a few times even on this forum, and the underlying story is very sparse with any sort of details...the story reads almost like a bedtime fable), or (2) there is something else going on (often times people who buy links are also doing other sorts of behavior that can, in fact, get a site whacked). Again, if it was as simple as buying paid links to my competitor, submitted a google web spam report, and bam, I would knock them off, that would be crazy. It just can't possibly work that way.

Again, this is just my opinion, based upon link building to my own sites and large numbers of client sites, as well as buying and selling links myself. To each their own, but I urge them to think critically about what makes sense and not rely on others (including Google and/or Matt Cutts) to tell you what the likely truth is.

If people in this thread really think spammy links or whatever can hurt your site, I've got tons of sites needing links and will happily let you link to them.

I've seen rankings lost by losing links or having them devalued. For example, if a blog or forum site gets overrun by male enhancement product spammers. However, the sites return when new links of value are obtained. Therefore, I would conclude that the problem was devaluing of links coming from those sites and there was no penalty applied to the site being linked to itself.

I have not had a locker since I left high school, which was in 1986.

I have not had a poster of anything, since around 1984 or 1985.

Nor do I consider myself a groupie of matt - he takes what has been posted in the google webmaster help and puts it into video format.

As for understanding "why" google has certain guidelines in place, I think its pretty straight forward, clear and too the point.