I recently didn't pay a scammer on ebay who had an auction selling backlinks. I won the auction since it was advertising paypal, but suddenly he wanted me to pay him with western union (which wasn't stated anywhere in the descrition and is prohibited by eBay). Of course his paypal account didn't work when I tried paying with paypal. I told him it was shady and to cancel the item. He goes nuts, F@#$ you, blah blah, really immature, in the end he threatens me that he will drop my PR, I think it's bs, and my PR is 0 anyways, or maybe 1-2 next update. Obviously I don't want to be on any black lists, but I suppose companies would be doing this all day long if it was possible to knock out a competitor. From what I read it doesn't do anything, it just doesn't help you. Or who knows, maybe it would help me. For instance if a bunch of porn sites all of a sudden link to my car part website would that be a bad? I suppose that's what he would do but who knows. I really wouldn't mind the links if they help me.
Hi, In my own experiences, if you have no outbound links on your sites to the bad neighbors, you would not be punished by Google or other engines. Google and other engines would drop those bad back links according to their own algorithm. Have a nice day,
He's talking crap. Although he can theoretically get you de-indexed (banned) by google, he can't "drop" your PR, and besides, it would take an epic xrumer blast and other spam and blackhat activities to get actually you de-indexed, which wouldn't be a certainty anyways, so there's a good chance his efforts would just end up benefitting you: free links! Posting backlinks to your site in shady places doesn't reflect negatively on your site, it just doesn't do any good, unless it's in large enough quantities for google to flag you as being a definite spammer, which is actually quite an accomplishment.
Thanks for the peace of mind guys. People are really on edge and angry or something nowadays, maybe it's the bad economy or our society is just falling apart, at least in the US.
The term you a referring to is called "Google Bowling". Here is an old article from 2005: http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/2005/10/27/google-bowling-how-competitors-can-sabotage-you-what-google-should-do-about-it Many people still debate if it's still possible..I know someone tried to do that to one of my sites last year. It was a shady DMOZ editor that I pissed off