I just read this article: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/ar...ow-and-why-you-shouldnt-mess-with-google.html about how John Chow got punished by Google for his campaign of giving free link backs to anyone who reviewed his site. Bad idea than? Would this also apply to a contest that awards links to weekly winners, or would you be able to get away with that since you are only giving away one link a week?
one link is fine ... he was receiving thousands of links with identical anchor text ... Google doesn't like that
Hi, Backlinking should be a gradual affair. A sudden surge in backlinks becomes unnatural and is often seen by Google as link spamming!
You know what I hate about that is, if you have something that suddenly become the thing of the moment, does that mean you will be a victim of your own sucess? What if something you do hits the headlines and you get a "sudden surge in backlinks". Are you penalized?
Yes, I'm thinking similar way, sometimes Google's rule isn't appropriate but I'm not sure it's just a rumor or not, in the case above, supposed someone created a very good informative article and many people like it and link to his page, then he got penalized? the same case applies if someone has just created an article site/blog, and he is so unlucky because there's another person who copies the article and create thousands of sites, then the original author get penalized too?
Don't worry if you get natural links. it is very unlikely to get penalized for something like that. John chow was a different storry as he linked back to those who gave him links.
John Chow's campaign was too obvious that's why he got penalized. Sharp yet natural increase of back links thus rankings will definitely not result in your site being penalized by Google.
Gaining links can never penalize you. But not all links are equal and will have different google ratings that may even change over time. I am gaining links with no plan to slow down. Faster the better, free directories, blogs etc. You cannot gain natural links unless you have great traffic. You need links to get traffic.
When something suddenly gets picked up by large number of backlinks, and is natural, it has a vary natural looking link profile, google has the sophistication to analyze your link profile and make a decision on whether it is spamming or natural effect .
Oh okay, I missed the point that john chow linked back to others, but I read somewhere that if we got suddenly big amount of links, then it could be considered as not natural.
Thats true. But it takes really big amounts of links with the same or nearly identical anchor texts to be hit. If you get a lot of natural links in a short time span they will have different achors etc and will be identified as natural and therefore not trigger a penalty.
If you get a ton of links that have your website name as the anchor text, that wouldn't cause a problem would it? I mean, that's just common practice.