Ban your competitors from google?

7 replies
  • SEO
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Hey Warriors,

I've read that your site can be banned from google by aggressive backlink building or by nuking it with unnatural linking techniques. Is this true? Can anyone share a google banning experience from building backlinks?

If this is true, couldn't people just nuke their competitors with the most black hat techniques possible to de-rank and ban them from google?

I assume Google doesn't want anyone to pursue unethical SEO techniques, but by penalizing a site by banning them seems like an opportunity for even more unethical behavior. Like the potential to ban your competitors with the same techniques you were banned for.

So, will google ban a site for a site for aggressive backlink building or is this a myth? I'm only interested because I want to build links without being banned.

Thanks

Brad
#ban #competitors #google
  • Profile picture of the author solado
    Its against googles TOS (building backlinks yourself to game the search engines) so yes, You can get banned and de-indexed.

    Yes, you can also nuke your competitors websites - they can also file reconsideration to get placed back onto the ranking.
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  • Profile picture of the author Matt Huggins
    Thanks for the insight, glad to know about that thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author MemberWing
    When I deployed my viral backlinks building system I underestimated the way it would work (based on specialized custom built web widgets) and at some point it generated around 25,000 backlinks a week (according to number reported at google webmasters tools).
    Google still boosted my rank and got me on the first page for highly competitive phrase.
    These are all one-way backlinks from clean and 90% relevants sites though.
    So number and speed of linkbuilding doesn't hurt from my experience.

    Gleb
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  • Profile picture of the author Kierkegaard
    Actually it is quite difficult to nuke a real competitor. The reason being that sites you're competing with tend to be well established with 1000s of natural backlinks. Buying a load of dodgy backlinks and pointing them to these sites would be a drop in the ocean and unlikely to make a difference.

    What Google would most likely do is simply disregard the dodgy lnks.

    For a site with 99.9% good links, 0.01% bad links - having the 0.01% links disregarded won't make a difference. Besides, no links are lost since the only ones disregarded woul be the ones bought by a rival. There will be no penalty for having these links.

    However, for a new site with 90% of its incoming links being bad, there will be a noticable difference when Google takes action and disregards 90% of the backlinks. On top of this Google will probably penalize the site for having such a high percentage of dodgy backlinks.

    The most vulnerable sites are new with few incoming links. But these sites are not yet deemed competitors by rivals and as such there is little point attacking them and trying to get them banned.
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  • Profile picture of the author mrclean78
    The term is called google-bowling. It is very real. Google will deny that it is possible but I can assure you that by spamming your competition with a certain amount of bad links that google will penalize them. Most of the times there site will come back eventually however.

    As mentioned above more 'established' sites are harder to bowl off the map, however newer sites are very prone to this form of attack. It has to do with google's spam-filters being set very high and penalizing sites for 'unnatural' link building.
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  • Profile picture of the author E. Brian Rose
    Originally Posted by Brad Kast View Post

    Can anyone share a google banning experience from building backlinks?
    Here's a famous one: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/bu...mc=globasasa24
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    Founder of JVZoo. All around good guy :)

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  • Originally Posted by Brad Kast View Post

    Hey Warriors,

    I've read that your site can be banned from google by aggressive backlink building or by nuking it with unnatural linking techniques. Is this true? Can anyone share a google banning experience from building backlinks?

    If this is true, couldn't people just nuke their competitors with the most black hat techniques possible to de-rank and ban them from google?

    I assume Google doesn't want anyone to pursue unethical SEO techniques, but by penalizing a site by banning them seems like an opportunity for even more unethical behavior. Like the potential to ban your competitors with the same techniques you were banned for.

    So, will google ban a site for a site for aggressive backlink building or is this a myth? I'm only interested because I want to build links without being banned.

    Thanks

    Brad
    You would practically have to build Hundreds of Thousands of the same type of links within a day to get penalized by Google. Think of it this way: as website owners, we have no control over how many people link back to our sites everyday. Now, suppose you were to post classified information, or breaking news, about President Obama on your website. How many backlinks do you think you would get within a day? You'd most likely get thousands of links pointing back to your site from a variety of sites. This phenomenon happens everyday with popular websites that have great content. People love to link back them, and Google expects this natural occurrence. Google is aware that you cannot control or slow down backlinking. What is not considered normal backlinking by Google is when your site receives hundreds of thousands of backlinks in the same day from sites in the same niche.

    Also, suppose it were the case that Xrumer backlinks could cause your site to be penalized (don't worry, it's not). Well, wouldn't that be fine & dandy! All you would need to do to knock your competitors out of the #1 spot would be to start up Xrumer and blast their site with thousands of links! Boy, wouldn't that be nice, if it were only that simple!

    Even if some of the sites that link to you are bad or "link farms", this will not hurt your site. Google may determine that those backlinks are of a lesser importance and they might not count as much towards your ranking, but they will not damage your site. Think of it this way: if it were possible to destroy a site's ranking this way, then we'd all be looking around for the next link farm to place our competitors' links on. Google realizes this, so it would be unfair to every website owner if backlinks (links on another website that point back to your site) could harm your site.

    However, you're right: Google is getting more severe with linking these days: with Outbound Links (which are completely different from Backlinks). Google has shown us with the new Panda Update that it doesn't like link farms. Meaning: If you want your website to rank highly you should Not have thousands of links ON your site pointing to other sites. Any links that are physically on your website are Outbound Links, which are not the same as backlinks.

    So, to summarize: Google will Not penalize you for the links that your website Receives, but it will penalize your site if it has too many Outbound Links (aka a Link Farm). Here is a very informative video showing that backlinks, which are also called "Incoming Links", cannot hurt your site:

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