I've seen a lot of people get thrown out of Google for various reasons, sometimes not really their fault (like a hack or server glitch), other times they were breaking Google rules too much. If you have been doing a lot of greyhat link building chances are once you are out that is it. A manual reviewer at Google won't consider your site for a reinclusion request with a dodgy backlink portfolio. I've never done a re-inclusion request, but I've helped a number of people shake off penalties. Matt Cutts has pretty much come out and said so when he explained that that penalized sites with large numbers of bad backlinks should start on a new domain rather than trying to get reincluded as their reinclusion team won't go through and manually devalue all the bad backlinks I've personally seen strong evidence that a really dodgy backlink portfolio can keep you in the sandbox for longer, but that's another story. So is greyhat link building dumb for long term traffic? If you spend months, if not years building up a site, creating lots of great content, and generally building a long term revenue source, does it make sense to risk that with low value links? The sort of links I am talking about our: Mass directory submissions Mass profile creation for backlinks Mass article submission & spinning Mass social bookmarking Mass blog commenting etc. If these don't cause direct problems themselves, and that can happen in some extreme circumstances, you will still always have it hanging over your head that if you run into issues with Google, then you may never get back in because of the bad backlink portfolio. I've seen so many business have to start over because of this when they were years in and making a success. I can understand doing greyhat link building on small sites that are quick and easy to make, then you do the quick and easy promotion to bump up their rankings. But if you have a long term business it seems a bit risky to me. Your thoughts?
Oooops, looks like I put this in the wrong category and got an infraction. It's in the right place now.