Poll: Does Google penalise for excessive link building?

So progressive and continous link building are preferrable . No doubt most of seo workers know that .

 

Did a ton of linkbuilding on a particular keyword at the begining of the year and Google just dropped us for that keyword for 2 months and we had been in the top 15 for that keyword for years.

So yes, 100% they will, which has always made me think that anyone being vindictive has an easy job, just buy a million links from ffa sites for your competition and watch your rankings rise naturally.

 

It depends, I think the quality of your links is important and if you have an unnatural jump in a specific keyword for one site this could cause a problem. I don't think there is excessive link building perse, quality is important.

 

Yes but excessive is relative. Such as a brand new site that get tens of thousands of backlink in the first month or two would more than likely get sand boxed.

 

Which is exactly why I think it doesn't matter.

 

Yes, sometimes getting too many backlinks at the same time can help Google penalize your sites, so better do it slow.

 

Search Engines understand that it is beyond the respective webmasters' control to decide where will their links appear. If search engines penalize these acts, then our competitors will submit our links to tons of banned sites, search engines and bad neighborhoods.

So, no it doesn't matter how many links you get, or how fast you get them. Google states that as long as you haven't gotten the links in an effort to affect your search ranking, then you have nothing to worry about.

 

I highly doubt an excess amount of linking, even if it is to manipulate search results, would result in a site being penalized directly. The most logical thing to do would be to put less weight, or completely ignore the links deemed to be excessive, manipulative, or spam.

Like a previous poster stated, if they actually penalized a site for excess link building, you could EASILY take out your competition at a very cheap cost.

Use your heads people.

 

I agree with you as far as established websites, but with new domains if you build 100.000 in a month from forums, guestbooks and blogs I'm 99.9% positive you'll get in trouble or banned.

On the other side if you reach 100.000 links in a new domain after you are featured in CNN, FOX, NY times, etc it is a completely different story, but Google clearly says that those links have a huge value.

The value of the links is a major factor.

 

I would say yes. Not only google, yahoo and bing will do the same too.

 

Sadly through personal experience I can say YAY - especially when a website is newish.

 

Yes because like any system a fraud or spamming flag will be detected if there are a sudden glut of links within a short space of time.

 

I'm just not seeing it happen. Is there any hard evidence out there to support this idea?

Think about this:

When Google unveiled Chrome, it received a million backlinks overnight...maybe more.

Someone posts a video on their site and it goes viral, everyone and their mother is posting a link to this video. You can't find a link but you search for it and just as you thought, there it is, #1 on Google.

Sites can gain overnight success, and popularity. It happens all of the time. Twitter is a recent example. While it had been around for a while, it just suddenly got huge amounts of attention. So, if what you're saying is correct, Google is going to penalize you for being successful, because there's no possible way that you could ever get a large number of links to your site in a short period of time without it being "spam".

I'm sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense to me.

 

slowly and steadily should not create a problem.

 

You can not compare a google product or twitter to the common website about viagra, real estate, loans, etc that most DigitalPoint members would create for adsense with duplicated content etc...

If your site is already established than it doesn't matter if all of the sudden you get 1.000.000 links through an hardcore viral campaign, but doing the same with a domain you bought a week ago or an average (almost spammy) buy-cialis-viagra-levitra.com I'm 99.9% positive that will get you in trouble.

It also highly depends on the link quality, most black hatters can create thousands of links from blog comments, forums and guestbooks in matter of hours, their domains or "parasite pages" usually rank high for a couple of days/weeks and then are sandboxed or banned.

So I agree and disagree with you, building 100.000 links in matter of days will get you penalized if your site is bad or average and will benefit if you have an "established" brand and domain name.

It all comes down to the quality of your domain, content, structure and back links you had before you achieved the 100.000 viral links.

At least that is my opinion...

 

We may almost be saying the same thing.

I was using Twitter and Google as examples of sites that have received massive links overnight. There is no way that they can possibly be compared to the MFA sites that are out there. So, I agree with you on that. And I agree that people that gain links simply by going out and getting reciprocal, forum, blog, directory links, etc... they are absolutely wasting effort that could be spent on a quality SEO campaign.

As you said too, quality links are the ones that everyone should be going for. So, I applaude your insight to the wiley ways of the search engines, though I still stand by my opinion, if you happen to get a million quality one way links by some incredible viral campaign, you won't be banned, penalized, or any other negative action will be taken upon your site. Google may investigate, but that would be all.

 

Completely agreed! Google will probably investigate and that is why the quality of the site would make a difference between great results and banning.

We are on the same page here, just different words

We should add so that the rest of the people understand that links achieved in a viral campaign will be "natural", in content and with different anchors which is completely different from blog comments, forum posting, blogroll links, directories, etc.

 

I haven't seen it specifically answered here, if it has, I apologize, but what does google consider excessive? I think its natural for most webmasters to go out an try and get links when they first post their site. I mean, would 3-4 a day be considered excessive?

 

For the most part, more is better. Takes a lot to trigger a negative response from google, especially if you have an older site. So I guess my general response is Nay. You have to work hard, or make a stupid / large link purchase, to get flagged.

 

If you build numerous links over a small time period then you are sure to get banned or suspended for some days.