Bad Backlinks CAN hurt you. But only in EXTREME circumstances

The common opinion is that dodgy backlinks can never hurt you. After several years running websites I've found this to be one of the widely shared misconceptions in Google SEO.

Before you flame me as not having a clue, please read the full thread...

This is all from my own experiences and observations, I could of course be wrong, so don't take this as gospel, but I've seen a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise.

Also it is only in extreme circumstances, so don't get worried just yet... I am certainly not saying that a few dodgy links will harm you and it is very very difficult to attack a competitor in this way. But a site not playing by the rules could get in trouble.

So Why Can Bad Backlinks Hurt?

It is true for the most part that bad backlinks cannot hurt you, but from what I have seen, Google does take into account the overall backlink quality when issuing a penalty.

From what I can gather Google typically won't do anything negative to your site based on a bad backlink portfolio alone, but in conjunction with something else (such as keyword spamming) it can result in a penalty. You need a lot of bad backlinks though - in the thousands.

One thing to note is that the more authoritative a site is, the less effect bad backlinks will have, but in that case their overall backlink portfolio will be healthy. This does mean that you can't try and de-rank a big site by linking to them with dodgy backlinks.

Smaller sites are more vulnerable, but like I said the site typically seems to need something else wrong with it to get hurt, again making it much harder for someone to damage a site through dodgy backlinks.

On the whole it is not something you really need to worry about.

Also there are human moderators which will look at backlinks and decide on intent - i.e whether they were from the site owner trying to game Google. Human moderators seem to be getting more common so this is something to be concerned of, and also there re-inclusion request team at Google will look through your overall backlink portfolio.

How Have I Come to These Conclusions?

Most people won't agree with me that bad badlinks can potentially hurt but I figured this out from speaking with experienced 7 figures a year or more webmasters and from assisting several people with recovering from penalties which helped me spot various patterns in how Google acts.

Also Matt Cutts has said Google only tries to ensure that site A can't hurt site B. He also says that penalized sites with large numbers of bad backlinks should start on a new domain rather than trying to get reincluded as their reinclusion team won't go through and manually devalue all the bad backlinks. Both comments from Matt are a sign that bad backlinks do upset Google in some way.

There's also a backlink over optimization penalty that Google issues on a one-page basis and it can pretty much effect any site (with bigger sites still being less vulnerable). Get a lot of links to the same page with similar link text and that page will drop down for that keyword. I've seen this happen a number of times over the past 2 years.

 

Im going to have to agree with you... Google even ADMITTED this before:


webpronews.com/topnews/2008/06/18/google-debunks-link-sabotage-theories

"In a mildly direct way, Mueller suggested the site's low quality, not the inbound links, needs work. As far as evil linking and site rankings go, Mueller said in a follow-up that in theory the linking cited could cause a problem in some "borderline situations," but still suggested the webmaster in question needs to study Google's quality guidelines."


So basically theyre saying nahh dont worry about it... but yeah itll hurt you in borderline situations!!!!!

 

Agreed!!!

 

bad or good actually is pretty straight forward for all, u can never say you're in bad or good side hehehe

 

I'll agree with you as well.
The mantra that keeps being repeated that you won't be penalised because you can't control it is obvious rubbish.
Google doesn't care whose fault it is.
Their responsibility is to serve up the best results to searchers - if something has happened to a site to compromise the integrity of the results, Google will remove it or downgrade it.
In most cases 'trashy' links will just be ignored, but if, for example, an xrumer blast has resulted in hundreds of thousands of identical links, and/or bad neighbourhood links, then yes, Google will penalise that site.

 

Thanks for the article link, ties in nicely with what I was suggesting.

I'm surprised everyone is agreeing with me, there's another thread here where everyone is saying the opposite.

 

I agree. IMO, the determining factor is the website's *trust* rating. A lot of 'dirty' links to site where the owner has been gaming the system and therefore has a very low trust rating, probably results in a penalty. The same set of dirty links to a trusted site has no effect because the site's high trust rating is still extremely high even if the dirty links reduce its trust rating ever so slightly.

A site's ultimate position in results pages is DocumentScore x TrustRating.

Example website:

DocumentScore = 1000
TrustRating = 1
Total Score = 1000
Position in SERPS = 1​

Same website with lower trust:

DocumentScore = 1000
TrustRating = .5
Total Score = 500
Position in SERPS = perhaps #25​

That why I believe *trust* is so critical.

 

Exactly

 

That is Great if this is true let create a list of extremely bad backlinks so i can use these on my competitors. This doesn't make sense. So we can create an industry of black hat attack seo.

 

Agree U!

Google doing things that human does..

 

What I wrote explains this is very difficult to do, especially to a big competitor - it's an extreme circumstance.

But yes there is a black hat market for this sort of thing, but it is very underground and very specialized. I read a post somewhere a while back where someone discussed they could do this - its often used as part of 'reputation management'.

On one of my sites I recently discovered a hack and hidden spam links were inserted - the typical viagra type spam keywords. When I checked where they were linking too it was a legitimate site that had nothing to do with these spam keywords.

The site being linked to was not ranking properly and Alexa showed a significant drop in SE traffic in the past few months.

Also if you searched for the spam keywords on the site pages would still come up, even though the keyword was not on the page, and the Google cache stated something like 'words not on the page, but appear in links to the page'.

The site was not small, but not hugely authoritative, about 2000ish backlinks I think.

I removed the hack and contacted the owner they may be a victim of a black hat attempt to get them penalized.

 

This is really a good thread for the newbies starting out and for veterans getting back on track. Think quality and slow building and not quantity as fast as possible!

 

I think bad backlinks ALONE cannot hurt you, but in conjunction with other factors that make your site seem like spam, then yes 100% it will hurt you. Google's algorithm is complicated beyond our knowladge, so its safe to say its smart enough to tell when your site is spamming, hacking, link farming etc.

 

What quality of the site served by google has anything to do with back links created by site owner or competitor ? You have no idea what are you talking about, just don't panic people with "omg i put you in seonuke and google will penalize you". Google will ignore what looks like spam back links and count the ones that it thinks are genuine.

So who wasted resources will get nothing, either site owner or competitor, and by counting only what it thinks is fair backlinks will reward the site and not apply punishments to possible innocent site owners. Also, Google is an USA company and in USA, you cant jail someone without proofs. So would be natural to think same principle apply in counting backlinks.

If its spam = value 0, who worked for it gets nothing. Genuine = site owner rewarded.

 

I agree with you.

 

If I saw any spam comments submitted on my blog, I delete the comments without any hesitation.

 

Absolutely right on. If google cannot determine intent to game the ranking then it has to assume that there is no such intent. The links from bad neighborhood will be discounted in calculating where to rank your site for a specific keyword.

 

Wise move, since outgoing links TO bad neighborhoods can definitely hurt you under some circumstances.

 

If the back links are not relevant, google will not consider that as back links. so its not a problem. But bad outgoing links will make problems in google.

 

Does that mean even link farms won't hurt the site so badly?