I've was checking my backlinks yesterday and saw a site that used one of my articles. The site was basically made up of all articles from other sites with links out. I've read that linking to bad sites can hurt your ranking. Can this be a bad link? How to I check to see if the site is banned/bad?
I don't know if I would be too worried about one bad site linking to your content. As long as you have enough "quality" links, one bad link won't hurt you. However, if all you have are linkfarms for backlinks, then you may see a penalty. There is an available Google Ban Checker Tool at iwebtool that you can use.
No, you have nothing to worry about in this case. It might even help actually if Google index that page you will have 1 more backlink.
Sites that link to you won't hurt your site. It is the sites that you link to that you have to be very careful about.
Thats an interesting comment re Sites that link to you won't hurt your site. It is the sites that you link to that you have to be very careful about I have just added a whole pile of links just to find my SERP steadily going backwards It seems to me that there must be bad links or links that google dont like to cause this to happen. I have gone from page 1 to page 6 for my main search term on google i can only assume that this is caused by bad links ?
Well I did create a few blogs to get links maybe for or five. But I didn't think That it would be considered a Farm...However some of the sites that I linked to are not even showing up when I check. If that was the case wouldn't the links at least show up if I'm being penalized for it?
TJ that one bad link shouldn't be a problem. The search engines understand that we don't have complete control over who links to us. They will not penalize you for a few bad links. Your quality backlinks should outweigh that bad link. grumpyb, it sounds like Google considered your mass link building to be spam. If you get too many links with the same anchor text, it sets off a red flag to Google. You need to make your link building seem natural. When you do things like get too many links all at once or use the same anchor text, then it looks unnatural to Google. In minor cases they wouldn't count the links. In more severe cases it is common to get a 50 rank penalty.
It doesn't make any impact on your website rankings if you are linking even with thousand of bad websites. Google only penalize the websites, which are providing bad links on his own website.
a bad incoming link might effect your website as if that website has been banned by google then you are also in the danger end........ to find a site been banned by google you can either go to google and search for that sire..........if it is not shown there it means the site is banned........but sometimes a site is deindexed from google as of having not good contents in it..........
Nope since it would be wayyy to easy for your competitor to link you to a blogfarm or something. But too many and you can get banned.
From what I've seen, it all depends on the "bad link". Generally, webmasters have no control over who links to their sites, thus it's difficult to give a penalty for things that you potentially have no control over. However, if it's a site that is known for selling links, that may be a different story.
Ok Thanks for your responses. I guess I'll contiune to gather links for now. I was on the first page for 2 sites for multiples key words in small niches and now gone so. One has came back to the first page for a long tail though... I'll Just have to wait and see what happens.
In my opinion and have consulted with other SEO companies on this, there is no such thing as a bad backlink. There are people on here who will say make sure your link isn't in link-farms etc. As long as the bad links are not outbound or reciprocal then you are fine. Because you cannot control where your links go to, if this were the case then my company would do anti-seo for our clients and spam the links around of there competitors to get them de-listed and knocked down in page rank. With that said the links in link farms do nothing for you but they are not BAD.
I had a site which I did only one way back links on, no black hat or shady practice at all, original hand written content and the works, I was getting one ways like mad for it and it must have raised a flad because the site lost all Google traffic (was 10,000 G search traffic coming in a month to 0) and PR 4 with internal PR 3 pages all stripped...
Yeah, I don't believe there is any evidence that this occurs. I think Google is smart about not letting competitors abuse the system (at least as much as possible). So, I don't think you can hurt your ranking, but you can definitely help it through proper link building. I wouldn't add my URL to a link farm just because I don't see much of a benefit and not sure if it would hurt my reputation among the community. However, It wouldn't have anything to do with me being afraid of the "wrath of google".
No, the SERP don't get hurt if bad sites are linking to you. But if you link to them, you may pay heavily!
If Google penalized incoming links then conceivably someone could damage a competitor by linking to them from bad sites.