Can Backlinks Hurt Your Rankings?

Yes, the wrong links can seriously damage your sites organic rankings.

If you care about the site be VERY careful how you acquire backlinks. Lots of SEO services sell bad links that could get your site seriously downgraded in Google.

If in doubt use intermediate websites to protect your main sites integrity. You can use other domains you own for this or free blogs. Basically any webpage you can link to that you can link out from with dofollow links. This forum is no good for this for example, the links are nofollow, so the links pass no SEO value. Linking from free Blogger blogs works, it's a free blog you own and the links are dofollow.

Basically you find/make webpages to link to/from that protects your main site. If a source of links are spammy and potentially SEO damaging, drop the intermediate webpage/domain from your network.

You don't need this protection if you only build quality backlinks, so depends how blackhat you are willing to go. If you use a backlink service you are pretty much guaranteed risky links, be careful.

David

Why do you think any update tends to have negative effect on lots of site?

Poor quality links of course..

Keep the links natural, high PR, relevant and clean.

As long as you are getting good quality backlinks from relevant sources, you have nothing to worry about. There is no reason for you to get spammy backlinks from the start. If you got some by some negative SEO attempt, you can simply disavow them from the Google webmaster tools.

In few words, spammy backlinks can hurt your rankings if you have too many of them.

yes. It can harm your website a lot. You have to be very careful where you buy it from. I recommend to focus on quality and build those backlinks yourself !

These days anything can hurt you. You have very little control over it even if you build your backlinks manually yourself your competitor may drive the flood of spammy backlinks to your website and get burn them very fast. Of course you may fight with that by sending them out to the disavov tool ,but it is waste of the time. These days parasites technique getting very popular, people/companies building blogs on platforms like wordpress.com and others and rank them, sometimes in a churn and burn way, sometimes as a normal website, the beauty of this solution is you don§t have to care too much about geting penalized you may have a lot of such websites and rank them, drive all those traffic to your money site and sleep well even if the competitor will try to burn your moneysite you still get the traffic from such parasites websites. Focusing on the one source of traffic these days is a very bad idea

Backlinks are the main reason why websites get penalised, so they can and will adversely impact your site if you get the wrong backlinks. Focus on quality sources, avoid using too many exact match anchor text, and build links gradually.

I Will never ever buy again links from sites like fiver, seoclerks etc.

and why?

because you dont know how will works the next update of pinguim. and because the links are poor, I have 3 websites damaged by poor links bought from seoclerks, doesnt matter the qualification of the seller and the comments of the buyers, the links are poor, period. Stay away from them.

To SEO: quality is inversely proportional to quantity in the most of cases .

Backlink creation using high PR and quality websites can never hurt your website's ranking. But, if the links are generated using low quality or low PR websites, using spam websites, then it will definitely affect your website's ranking. So while creating backlinks, check the website properly using which the backlink is to be created.

And always get your links manually.

yes, definitely bad backlinks can damage your sites organic rankings. So, always try to create the good and original link for the website.

Yes, backlinks can hurt your website..

It depends on the backlinks itself. If the backlinks are spammy, blog comments - this definitely will hurt your website

However, if your backlinks are from high quality, authority website (eg forbes, cnet or problogger), this will gradually help your website.

Hope this helps.