Do you people really believe eveything what google says? Just imagine if google would say YES, inbound links can hurt your site? Mass attacks on each other would start and so on. I always think from the other point of view then analyzing information provided by google people and in most cases googlers just can't give out the truth..
It has been my understanding that links from bad sites can be bad for you, maybe google does not like the directory you added your site to.
Hey Fbos123, I see no harm in submitting one of the top 3 for your keyphrase to those same directories just to see the effect. As a programmer one of the things you do to get an answer is test each element one by one. And if by some chance it is the backlinks that caused the drop then Google is forcing your hand to ruin other peoples hard work.
In my theory the bad backlinks can hurt the SERPs, despite the fact that all think it can't... I think it can We can do a little test....
Does anyone remember the "John Chow Incident of 2007" ? too many links, too fast, sure hurt him.. If google thinks your links look un-natural, it WILL hurt..
In my exprience, if your site is PR 3 or above, you can throw as many links at it at once as you want, and it won't hurt. If it is PR 2 or below, you may get sandboxed for a while, but usually you will come back with better rankings. (that is if the anchor text you want to rank for is used in the new links)
If inbound links hurt you as you say they are it would restructure the entire platform of seo and link building procedures. This being said I have had instances where google shuts my account down for several days for extensive activities and reduces my PR while they review my sites. The web is full of overpopulated useless site directories which do not help or harm PR they are set as neutral in effect. Thanks, JRHODES
my speculation is that as google gets smarter.. inbound link may be counted as negative is the anchor texts are all negative.. think for a moment, if many comments all saying a particular site is a fraud and scam.. google will take cues .. does it make sense? for other cases.. I don't think it would hurt your ranking.. discounted to zero pr boost maybe but not into negative territory
Inbound links, may or may not be a factor. There are so many different things that can cause changes in the SERPs, debating ONE possible element is a waste of time.
I agree with most of those who say it might be something else, I don't think incoming links hurt you, unless they are in "bad neighbourhoods"?
I think this comes from keyword spamming in posts, spamming you keywords over and over x25, this is what it could have looked like, they may have penalised you but at least they haven't banned you. They may do a review soon and put it back to its original postion. I guess its not the case that links hurt - its just spamming loads of text links quickly. + if all the sites were cheap directories then how would that look?
For my point of view backlinks can hurt a website if you post a backlink on blog articles that has hundreds of spam comments and link farms.