Can poor inbound links affect my site?

Sorry i meant a inbound link from a link farm.

 

So, you are saying I can go out and put YOUR websites on a million FFA link farms and get YOU kicked out of Google? Sweet!

 

I'm getting the general feeling that the PR of the site that backlinks to your site can't negatively affect your PR - this is great news because this is part of my business plan (I use the term loosely!).

I'm marketing my site in two different ways; one for the punters that just want a good place to find categorised images and the other is to webmasters that want to advertise their content and get backlinks.

I was concerned, until I read this thread, that because my site is currently only a PR3 people would be worried about having a backlink from it.

I'm now going to get to telling webmasters how they can get a backlink from my site, sweet

(just by posting an image URL BTW)

 

Well inbound links cannot be controlled so i cannot see how it can penalize you.

 

Obviously, you didn't read it.

 

I have read them all - HillTop, TrustRank, PageRank, etc and so on. But a paper does not always translate to reality. My question is - can I knock my competitor out of Google by linking to their sites from a million crappy sites?

 

I am not really in the know, but I believe you can.. when Google sees an unnatural linking behaviour, they put a penalty in the serps on the site. Mainly with regard to the anchor text of the link.

I think it is a nice wife's tale that you can't affect your competitors sites so that competing webmasters are not inclined or spend time to knock out their competitors, then it makes the search engine's job that much harder.

However, there are definitely different thresholds, I don't think even a very concerted effort could knock out say www.apple.com when you search for "apple". That is you might knock out a weak competitor, but not a strong one.

Now I have not tried any of this, but it is just my understanding. Do you know of any SEO firms offering a service to do reverse-SEO for your competitor? That might be a popular service.

Eric

 

If anyone can, http://seoblackhat.com/ can.

 

I don't know if you can knock them out of Google (i.e. get them banned completely) by linking from spammy sites alone but, if they are already flagged as a spammer for other reasons and their backlinks are not that solid, it could pass a threshold. The TrustRank algorithm doesn't say anything about getting banned and I didn't say anything about getting banned either. The algorithm says that many poor quality inbound/outbound links can negate the effect of some good quality links by applying a negative weight in the calculation of your rank.

I used to think that links from external sites couldn't negatively affect your site because that means your competitors could get you penalized which you don't have control over but now I question that. Someone would have to spend a LOT of time and money and, in the end, the best you would get is a penalty against ONE competitor. That's why I can't see people attempting this and I think Google takes this into account when they attempt to detect unnatural linking practices.

 

Exactly - which is why I am asking - how does TrustRank relate to the REAL world?

 

yes

Would Affect Traffic and Spam.

 

Arrrrggg - penalties - lower rankings - dude, read the whole thing

 

I read the thing years ago - what I am looking for is how it is implemented - not an academic view of how it COULD be implemented.

 

I think Aaron Wall explains it pretty clearly in the link I posted on the first page of this thread.

 

Clearly describing what COULD be done (in May 2005). My calendar says it is almost 2007 and if Google uses inbound links, which webmasters have NO control over, as a method to determine "bad sites" - then that method will be manipulated to hurt innocent webmasters.

 

are you guys talking about normal sites? Like link exchanges in the same niche would be penalized because I link back to them?

 

yes, spammy links are not good and you may be penalized for them. Try to stay from FFA sites.

 

So, if I go out and get 10,000 spammy links to www.link-exchangers.com - I could negatively affect your Google rankings?

 

Actually an update to this topic. After listening to Boser & Oilman on SEO Rockstars they said it does affect your ranking. If you have to many poor oneways pointed at your website then it will look much worse in the spiders eyes.

 

Cool - so now I can start knocking my competitors out of the SERPs by pointing spammy links to their websites. Well, this is the beginning of the end of Google then...