Backlinks can hurt you!

I am basing this conclusion on a very clear example. 1 site (PR6) was very competitive (top 3) for thousands of keywords. He used to have a lot of relevent links. Then he bought 2 site-wide irrelevent PR8 links and 1 site-wide PR7, irrelevent also, among other links. the sites are like more than 30K pages each. These links devalued this site and this was automatic (not penalized by a human otherwise he would have banned him). Now he is far behind in the serps.


Mods: again, this is not a website review, I wanted to share a conclusion based on a website. The website itself doesn't matter.

 

Google & Matt Cutts have clearly stated that the disapprove of paying for text links.

If they have spotted the paid links (either manually or algorithmically) then they will have penalized the site or at least discounted the links value.

 

This is something that I still don't get.
Google CANNOT accurately determine if a link is paid for or not. It is impossible for 100% accuracy, so how can they penalize someone.

 

I don't think that it was discounting of the purchased links otherwise he would have stayed in the same serps.
And it is not a penality, it is more like the very strong irrelevent links gave another meaning to the site, they switched its content. JMO

 

So we should revise the original title:
Paid-for backlinks can hurt you.

>> it is more like the very strong irrelevent links gave another meaning to the site, they switched its content
Very interesting statement.

 

"Irrelevent backlinks can hurt you"

 

You've really got me thinking. Consider: The sites from whence backlinks come play a part in determining the content/theme/category of a site. Very strong irrelevant backlinks could then change that, knocking the site down in the SERPs for niche keywords.. Interesting concept.

 

I think google can fairly accurately determine whether a link is paid or not, but I don't think they will penalize for it. More like not count it, but why would they penalize.

This brings back up the idea of killing your competitor by getting millions of irrelevant purchased links to their site. If it was that effective at burying a site, then we would see way more link warfare.

How can you be sure that these links were the reason that the site's ranking dropped? There are hundreds of potential possibilities, and this could completely be a coincidence.

 

I am following this site closely, and I can say I am 80% sure that this is the reason. but who knows!

 

That's exactly what I meant.

 

Definitely something to think about. If the perceived topic about a website / page is even remotely based on the links that come into it, then this definitely could play into reducing the rankings across the board for a website.

It seems like it would be extremely advanced, as the SE would have to use semantics or some other relation based model to build relationships between phrases, to determine what is related and what's not.

 

It's a catch 22. As already mentioned, if this were true, I could get some high-pr irrelevant backlinks to a site and ruin its SERPs. That doesn't sound quite right. Are you sure there's nothing else going on?

 

I dont know that I would agree with this 100%. I know of a few top ranked real estate sites that have a ton of non themed links pointing at them. Some of these range from quilting forum to a space probe site. These non relevant themed links have not dropped their sites.

IMHO what maybe dropped this site was the use of sitewides and the issue of them being non themed. I think it deluted the theme of the site they were pointing to based on the theme they were coming from. Matt has stated purchased links will get you in trouble.

 

If a site has 10,000 backlinks with 99% relevancy ratio and you add 2 times 30,000 irrelevant backlinks, the relevancy ratio fall to 14%, which is already not really good also SEs can see the 60,000 bl jumps as spamming.

I'm not sure it was a good move.

 

If this is the case, I could stop white hat SEO tactics and spend lots of money on buying irrelevant links to sites I want to get out of the way. I wonder what they think about that... they say that nothing a competitor can do will hurt you, this will be a clear way to contradict that statement.

 

But, how do SE's know what is related within a theme. There are unlimited possibilities and subtle relationships between words and phrases and topics.

I don't think that any SE is advanced enough to recognize what is and what is not related.

 

What mhamdi and exam say is probably true. Happened to me about 4 years back. Google dumped me for my keywords and upped me on some which were of no use to me.

 

I am trying to follow the thread but do not know what serps means!
Thanks
mark

 

Search Engine Result Pages

basically, what you get when you search

 

In the google sitemap panel they mention in the stats some of the keywords of your site (in addition to anchors linking to you,...) it is like they give a theme to your site.