I read about Google bowling sometime ago and learnt that this term has been coined for more than three years now. Some people argue that Google Bowling does not work but I just checked backlinks to one of my websites and found that there was a huge number of weird links to my site. I believe they are an attempt to put my site down. Here is an example of how they look like. www.example.edu/~somevalue=10 Could somebody please explain what is this and if it is Google Bowling, then what can be done to counter it. Many Thanks.
.edu links though? thats a good thing surely? googlebowling is not supposed to be easy to if, if possible at all, but is a source of much debate. they'll more likely help you more than hurt you.
Are all the links come from the same website? You could write to the manager of the website, their hosting provider and finally Google
this is a good thread to acquaint yourself with the whole concept. can inbound links really hurt you? you'll have to ignore all the bickering though
that is quite a good idea. Although I am not too sure if the manager of the website in question will be aware of it because origionally the link does not exist on their website. I still can't understand how they do it but I read somewhere that it works. In our case, it is working because we have lost Google search ranking substantially without any apparent reason (and later found those links to our website)
You don't need to be doing anything apart from a good .htaccess thing. Just redirect all such homepage links to the home page and that would be to your advantage that your competitor would give it to you.
I don't believe that there is such a thing as google-bowling. If you have a lot of 'real' links and some goofball places links to your site (even site-wide on a crappy site) I wouldn't worry about it. I have had this happen a lot, but have never lost serp due to it. Think about it; if it actually worked, there would be a lot of shady sites around offering to blow your competition out of the serps. Also, in my experience I have seen too many sites that do well serp-wise even though they have crappy links. If you are really worried about it, inspect the offending site. In the past other sites copied my content, and spun it to all kinds of shady sites, but I left it alone. Check what sites google shows for backlinks for your site (link:www.yoursite.com - yes I know this is an incomplete list, but it can show you what google might be paying attention to.) Are your serps affected? If not, I wouldn't worry about it. If your serps are suffering and you are looking for a cause, I would examine your other SEO work before I chalk it up to google bowling. At the end of the day, I think we give too much credit to google. Yes, they are huge, yes, they are incredibly efficient, yes they are darned irritating at times, but they are not perfect. I am starting to subscribe to the idea that 'a link is a link is a link'. Some are simply better than others. Google is more likely to penalize you for your outgoing links, content, or the 'daily Murphy' than google bowling.
It can work if you build a bunch of links to another person's site too quickly and with duplicate content. Submitting a lot of articles to spam blog article promoters might hurt them some.
I've never heard such a term - until recently with all this talk of "silver bullet" links I've never thought ANY backlink could directly hurt you???
Google says over and over that they acknowledge the fact that we have no control over who links to us, so it won't hurt us. But, it is also said that a large amount of links unnaturally will? It's a double edged sword right? This is the first I've heard of "Google Bowling" so now I'm eager to learn more about it. I've seen some funky url's like that in my stats, so now I'm concerned
Oh so Google Bowling is other people sending you links from bad sites? I've always understood that incoming links can't hurt you if you aren't linking back.
It's very interesting, however, I think it does not have serious implication to Google's system. If it had, nobody would be safe sending articles to directories since many of the links earned by this method are provenient from poor sites and blogs.
lol, yea... the basic consensus was that some say they still can, some say they can't. those who've "seen" it happen can't talk about it because of the situation, the others didnt believe them. who knows? anyway just yesterday an acquaintance in the business just picked up an old banned (bad, bad, dont ask) domain for experimental purposes, anyone up for seeing if 301ing it at their site knocks them out ?