Penalized for incoming links

What thoughts do you guys have on this article? DevShed is usually pretty much right on, but this seems a little sketchy. Essentially, they are saying that a site can be penalized for the quality of inbound links. This is opposite of everything that I've read.

http://tools.devshed.com/c/a/Website-Content/The-Link-Swapping-Trap/

Seems that I could manipulate my competition's rankings by submitting them to a bunch of link farms. Of course I would never do that, but this article would open that door.

 

I find it hard to believe that Google would penalize your "page" because a link to it was found on a "link farm" or other such pages.

 

My thoughts are these:

1. DevShed publishes a lot of syndicated content. Heck, I've had articles published there.

2. The author uses the term "link farm" in a very non-standard way. This causes his credibility to be questioned.

3. The author writes authoritatively about facts which no one outside of the Google SCIF has knowledge of. This completely destroys his credibility.

 

WS, I always read your posts with great interest and attention, but I think you are a little harsh on the writer here. I wish I had read an article like this one several months ago.

To me it would make perfect sense to penalize all the low quality inbound links (poker, casinos, mortgages, viagra etc.) that people add because they are easy to get, and because they are desperate to accumulate a surfeit of links to improve thier Page Rank - not because they have the slightest relevance. ....Unless of course, you are running a website about middle-aged Texas Hold'em players in 'Vegas who need to to take a second mortgage to buy trinkets for a floozy who is losing interest because they can't , er, "play" quite as well as they used to.

What makes me mad is the amount of writers that say blithely, in effect: "build great content and the search engines will find you, and worthwhile sites will link to you." e.g., per this writer:
"There is only one method I know that works: put valuable, original
content on your website. Other websites, blogs, and forums
will post links to the valuable content on your website...."

Bollocks!

Nube's Nightmare
1. You have utterly sublime content; but no one knows that, as you won't show up on the SERPs.
2. You don't show up on the SERPs because your content isn't Indexed.
3. Your content isn't Indexed, in part, because no one is Linking to you, DMOZ is a catastrophe, Google is in no hurry to Index because it wants money for AdWords and can afford to tolerate the production of less than optimal search results because it has such a dominant market share. Yahoo is also in no hurry to Index as it would rather that you pay for Directory Submission. MSN quite likes Overture revenues that come from sites that can't be found any other way than PPC too.
4. No one is Linking to you because you have no Page Rank.
5. You have no Page Rank because no one is Linking to you.
6. You can get (reciprocal) Links from Directories, but run a strong risk of being penalized by Google for appearing in irrelevant drossy Directories.

No matter how good the website, if you don't use SEO to the best extent you can, pay for Links and AdWords, pimp articles and Press releases, and read these forums cover to cover, you will surely starve while you wait for release from the guilty until proven innocent Sandbox.

I know my content is good. What I need is a second mortgage to pay for more AdWords.

 

Point three is a hot button for me. I concur.

 

Quick question. In your guys opinion, is it a good idea to stay clear of all reciprocal link programs? I am new to all this and trying to figure out how to jump start things.

 

look at the site you want to put a link on and ask yourself the obvious questions.

I think this whole article is bunk by another pissed off SEO that has been exposed as nothing more then the third party martketeers they really are.

People are learning and doing their onw "marketing" everyday. As this is happening we're seeing more and more dis-information.

If you look close, most are talking out of both sides of their mouth's.

 

Don't mistake opinion pieces as fact or as correct.

 

The problem I have seen with the "reciprocal linking programs" is that the links you get generally are not worth getting.

Your links ends up on a low-PR deeply-nested page with 50 other links. Total SEO value == near zero.

I did reciprocal linking programs for awhile, then finally decided it wasn't worth the time it took to type in all of the links.

 

i agree.

if you can focus on one-way links.. these are your best bet... i stopped link swapping a while ago.

 

Yeah,

I haven't been too thrilled with DevShed's articles - there was another thread here criticizing an article at SEOChat that I felt fully deserved the criticism.

The article should be more speculative as in "there is the possiblity that..." rather than "this is what happens..."

 

I'm not an SEO expert but have spent my fair share of time researching it. I personally don't believe that poor inbound links can penalize you, but since I don't work for google I can't say for sure.
I'd agree with previous posts that most of the reciprocal links that you are going to be able to get probably aren't going to help you with pagerank since they are usually on pages with tons of links. I think most search robots sniff out links pages fairly easily. Recirprocal links have however increased my traffic. I get thousands of visitors of every month from link exchange programs. I also believe that quality reciprocal links provide value to my visitors, so I continue to offer them and seek them out.

 

I still swap thousands of links ever week

it still seems to work fine

I love my gambling and viagra link partners, love em.

 

Sounds like the link farm issue is more a topic of opinion than fact. I will proceed carefully.