someone needs to set up a test, where you link all kinds of spam and bad neighborhood to a site and see what happens I don't believe google would put something in their algorithm that could be used for the purpose of damaging your competitors site that way, but who knows for sure, there have been bad decisions made before in this world
I have had something like this happen when i created 16,000+ links to one site in a very short time, it affected the pagerank negatively but not the serps, the site get 30k UV p/m so i think your theory is somewhat flawed
Dont believe what you are saying for 1 second Valley. I have dozens of test sites setup, some with links all using same anchor, some using just sitewide backlinks, some using just recip, and one that only has a single PR8 backlink and all are going strong. Most are getting their highest Adsense days since being created. If these site dont look like an unnatural or paid link profile i dont know what does.
Linking out to a banned or de-indexed site is a worst problem. Bad neighbours linking to your website is outside of the webmasters control, therefore should not be a cause for being penalised. If this was a factor it would be very easy to take down the competition!
I think is better to speak with examples and try to evaluate your opinion. Google giving penalty for bad links sounds to me stupid because as said from others before and that was and my first thought.. this could start a war between competitors. I don't think google has act so stupid and leave such a security hole. The solution would be zero credits from bad links.
This is done manually??? So google engineers are going over their billions of website database and tweeking this manually. Doesn't make sense to me. Every now and then google does adjust some things maually when it affects their SERPS significantly. But there is no way they can adjust all their Search results manually. If the all your inbound links are from bad neigborhood, then it might affect the serps. But if you have other natural links, the bad inbound links shouldn't affect.
total pants. its says on matt cutts blog that there is nothing a competitor can do regarding linking from bad hoods to get you banned. come on, theses lot at google are not thick, they wont be dropping sites because of the reason you stated, webmasters that have seen this have been getting high pr links from sites that are completly unrelated, that will be the reason why they have seen their sites drop. think it is easy for googlebot to do a simple cross check to see if your sites keywords appear on the authority site, if the qurey comes back false they you pay for it by a drop. my 2 cents
I agree with you, as long as google is just ignoring the links, but many seem to be reporting that there sites are suffering penalties rather than just having a few of their backlinks not counting
You wont loose SERP's but one of my sites went from PR4 to PR0 just after last update due to the amount of inbound links i created, The site had 0 outbound links so the only reason my site could of lost its page rank was due to the amount of low quality inbound links. There was no link selling and it was an established site, almost 7 years old, there is no other explanation other than the inbound links. this is not a theory its fact, it happened to me.
I am now more convinced than ever that the backlinks are dropping the serps. The penalities seem to vary from - 50 - -70 serp drop. The problem is in the context of the link and if it has too much juice. Whilst I agree with Louise ant the juice and theme, the sites were banned, and a lot of them! Even if they were reindexed a few days later. The theory is that G is reading these threads and are manually banning/ dropping sites/ serp penalties Beware who you speak and deal with! An d I bet some of those G people have double standards. Penalizing some sites whilst leaving theirs and their mates alone.
How long before the forum posters, bloggers and directory submitters offer "competitor nuking" as a paid service. Hell I might just start a company doing just that!
Well there is Search Engine Reputation Management, which i guess you could call "competitor nuking". I do these services, and it's been around a long time.
what about forums where the users post lots of links every day? that is lots of outlinks, and is innocent and google should have no problem with it (do they?) and for sure inlinks should never matter, because we have no control over who links to us how can they ever penalize a site for links and think they are doing something just?