SEO MythBuster Revisited: Inbound Links
You know how in horror flicks there’s always that point where you think the killer is dead? Just when the main character lets out a sigh of relief, WHAM! The killer springs back into action because apparently the death blow was in fact merely a flesh wound. I’ve always wondered what the protagonist was thinking when the villain popped right back up. Now I know it’s something along the lines of “Are you &#*@ing KIDDING ME?”
In case you haven’t figured it out by the title, I’m having to revisit the myth I thought I had previously exposed as well… a myth. I’m not sure if I just wasn’t convincing or not enough people read it or what, but if the real Myth Busters have to revisit things, I figure I’m not above it either.
The Myth
The premise of this myth is quite simple: that somehow links pointing at your site (also known as inbound links) can somehow hurt your rankings.
Recently I encountered a situation where I had placed a link to a site (an old and established site) in the blogroll of one of my blogs. Like most blogrolls, this was a site wide link and I had roughly 400 pages of content indexed in Google for this blog. A while later, the site I had linked to saw their rankings tank. After searching around, the site owner contacted me asking me to remove the link to their site. Their reason being of course, that gaining those 400 links in a short period of time had caused them to receive a “very specific” Google penalty for their top few terms, one of which I had used as the anchor text of my link.
Also not too long ago I got into a rather heated debate with Hamlet Batista (who’s blog has actually turned out to be pretty good despite his being wrong on this issue) about whether or not John Chow’s site had been penalized due to a high number of sites linking to his with the exact same anchor text. John seemed to back up Hamlet’s position by changing the rules of his review offer to allow different variations of the anchor text. Of course he also fixed his broken robots.txt file that had been blocking spiders from accessing most of his site but that hasn’t deterred many people from believing incoming links were the culprit (or at least part of the problem).
Last but not least, earlier this week, “King Nomar” published a post titled “How your competitors can sabotage your website rankings.” In it he stated that “Your competitor might add your website to several spam linking schemes to hurt your site.”
And viola, a revisit is born.
As I mentioned previously, Google has stated several times that there is almost nothing a competitor could do to affect your rankings. Now obviously a competitor could hack your site and do quite a bit of damage or possibly even hurt your rankings by administering a DDOS attack and taking your site down for an extended period of time. However, I’m here to tell you (again) that something as simple as linking to your competitor’s site will not harm their rankings.
In the blogroll example I gave earlier, if the inbound links were the problem, what would happen to their rankings if I didn’t remove the links? Obviously you can’t control who links to you. If you don’t want a certain site linking to yours, all you can do is ask nicely for them to remove the link. In this case, if my link to their site was the reason their rankings dropped, a less scrupulous person might be inclined to ask for a fee to remove the links. I mean people pay SEO’s to help them improve their rankings all the time, so why wouldn’t removing a link that you think is harming your site worth a similar fee? Better yet, how much would linking to each one of your competitors be worth? If I can take a site out of the top 10 in Google simply by linking to them, those links would be worth WAY more than any link I could sell to improve PageRank or search engine rankings wouldn’t it? I could auction my services off to the highest bidder and make a fortune!
On top of all that, you’d have thousands of webmasters linking to competitors not because they have a quality site, but because they want to harm their rankings. That would essentially put an end to Google’s practice of viewing a link as a “vote” for the site being linked to. Google’s built their algorithm heavily around links and now I’m supposed to believe they’d allow something like this to happen? I don’t think so. Not when they could simply devalue the links in question or ignore them all together. That would keep any links they believe to be artificial from influencing their rankings and wouldn’t open their algorithm up to the kind of abuse I just described.
The ChallengeÂ
Unfortunately, I’m sure there are going to be people who are still not convinced that inbound links can’t hurt you. Despite the mound of common sense staring straight at you, I’m sure there are those of you who are clinging to your belief in the evil inbound links. So, I’d like to propose a challenge to my detractors. Tell me exactly what circumstances you think would lead to inbound links harming a site. I’ll then do my best to recreate those specific circumstances and then point as many spam links at the sucker as possible. I’ll document the whole process over the course of a few months and we’ll see who’s right. Are you up for it?
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I just checked johnchows robots.txt and it looks alright. No where to be seen on G, though.
But the real culprit is not people linking to John. It is John linking to hundreds of sites, belonging to people, who are lazy to build links – and that should tell you a lot about them. I don’t even want to insult you by hinting that you don’t get this ;)
Yuri,
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear. The first time John disappeared from the index all together and it was because he had a jacked up robots.txt. This time he’s been penalized and you’re right, its all the reciprocal linking he does and possibly all the links he sells.
It’s an interesting challenge, and I’m definitely interested in hearing how it goes.
There are a lot of SEO-related myths out there. You can’t control who links to you, but I have seen someone buy a bunch of expired domains that had a lot of links–and pointed them to their competitor’s site with a 301. Turns out that since their competitor had about 150 links and now they had over 1000 that were off-topic–competitor lost rankings due to the fact that their overall link topics changed.
Evil inbound links! Ha!
I completely agree with you about this. Unfortunately, I think there are some people who will always believe that inbound links, and no amount of evidence to the contrary is going to dissuade them of that opinion.
Bill, thanks for the comment. Most of the stories I hear like this are very similar to yours, however, they are second or third hand info at best and I’m pretty skeptical of allowing other people assign cause and effect. I’m not saying that your story didn’t happen but I’d like to know more details before I place the blame at the feet of inbound links.
Right now I’m planning on testing a relatively new site with a fairly small number of links as well as an older more established site with lots of links. If anyone had any other suggestions please let me know!
Skitzzo, I agree with alot of what you say in that many times the blame for a drop in rankings is placed on the wrong things and that second hand knowledge is no good as well. But I will take you up on the challenge because I have no doubts that you can devalue a site by pointing links to it.
Case in point, I worked for a very large Internet Marketing firm in the past that purchased tens of thousands of dollars in text link ads, just like everyone else does in that industry. Well, they bought millions of inbound (site-wide ad on a ginormous site) links with the same anchor text without knowing that the site had millions of pages (seriously, millions). So millions of inbounds overnight, on the same anchor text, on top of the many inbounds they already had on that same anchor text, got them penalized after holding a #1 or #2 spot for years on that term.
It would cost someone alot of money to do this to a competitor or for anyone to test though. So this leads me to believe that you will never truly be able to test this theory.
Once again, a ton (millions) of inbounds, on the same anchor, at virtually the same time, and from the same site, is what got the site in question dropped.
About your blogroll link myth…and your challenge…Though I am not a detractor…just investigating a mystery here. So you linked a client’s site to a old and proven site of yours and the results, it seemed, were that client’s site’s serps tanked. Here’s a possible reason that is not the “gained 400 links quickly” reason: If you created your client’s site and host it on the same server (IP) as your personal proven site, it is possible that Google discerned that and did the smack-down. That actually did happen to me. How I resolved it was to remove the link from the [client] site and resubmit the sitemap to Google for the established site.
This is not exactly like receiving normal inbound links, it is more of what might called an incestuous link. So though I do not disagree with you that inbound links cannot be harmful, I am convinced that incestuous inbound links can be.
Worth a ponder, anyway.
Miguel Salcido is right.
You quite definitely can damage a sites ranking by the links you throw at it.
Its not a myth, and you never have ‘busted it’, just presented your own myth based untested theory.
Its not cheap to do, and it can backfire if you get it wrong, but it can be done.
I guess you will never be convinced until you see it with your own eyes, but if you construct a ‘tightly controlled’ test, you will be able to replicate it. Remember, that Google statement says “almost nothing” – those words are chosen for a reason. What they HAVE done, is made it difficult and expensive to do.
Catt,
This definitely wasn’t on the same IP and actually my blog (which ranks very well for several competitive terms) is on a hosted service.
Thank you for the comment though. If you’ve got any other theories please share.
4eyes, explain to me what I need to do to make it a “tightly controlled test”. I realize Google says ALMOST nothing but I don’t believe the “something” that statement allows for is inbound links.
You seem to act like you’ve seen it happen or been a part of it yourself. Care to back up your statements with any examples or fact or hell, any logic even?
In my experience most of the claims that someone’s hurt them with inbound links come from whiny website owners that can’t accept that they haven’t been able to rank (or have dropped in the rankings). It’s a scapegoat and tough to pinpoint and thus a convenient excuse.
Skizzo – Thanks for your compliment, as well as for the great exposure you gave my young blog when I had just started.
As you mentioned, JC’s actions make your conclusions still debatable, but I have to say that I partially agree with
you regarding the potential of incoming links harming a site.
Why partially? Because as you say, it is fairly simple for Google to discount harmful (spammy) links instead of penalizing the entire website and leaving the non spammy link structure intact. In fact, I believe that the reason for John’s drop is because they discounted all of his incoming links from reviews, weakening his site’s importance and authority.
However, what can you prevent a determined competitor from building links to your site, with the purpose of making your link profile more artificial and breaking the natural signature that search engines like?
For site with a lot of incoming links this is obviously not a concern.
Exactly, Hamlet, that’s why the cure is pretty easy: you get plenty of natural links.
Btw, I’ve had been blogrolled by a blog with 500-1k pages and submitted to Dmoz (which is copied by 70-100 sites, not by me) within 2 weeks of starting the blog. I think it took 4-5 months to notice a significant boost from the links. And, of course, 6 months after starting the blog, my G traffic doubled.
Awesome! I think I’ve figured out my new link-building strategy… :-)
1. Contact all my top competitors anonymously, warning them about my up-and-coming site.
2. Tell them the way to keep me from overtaking their position is to put up site-wide links to my site using the best keywords that they are already ranking for.
3. Reference some of these SEO myth articles for proof that they can ‘kill’ my rankings.
Of course, I’d have to have a story about why it only works against my site and not the other competitors (domain age or something)….
if john links to websites which are potentially dead or inactive does this mean john is going to hurt his own ranking by linking to a dead site ?
Skitzzo, I never got a response to my post challenging my facts. It is VERY simple but VERY expensive to test. And I know, first hand, that it DID in fact happen. And the site it happened to was established in the #1 or #2 spots for the keyword in question along with many other terms in Google, for many years!!! Then it dropped all of them overnight. For over 2 years they have been severely penalized in Google and just recently got back in. Here is how to bomb a competitor:
1. Buy a site-wide text link ad from a site with millions of indexed pages, and using the same anchor text on all pages.
2. Point the links at a competitor that is targeting the term used for in the anchor text of the link buy.
This will create millions of inbound links on the same anchor text overnight and will trigger Google’s filter and get them de-listed.
Really, I promise!
Miquel, I’m working on setting up my test. I don’t mind using my own sites but I’ve got to find someone with lots and lots of crappy spammy pages. I’ll update this post once the testing begins and then when we see the results. This is going to take a while I’m sure.
In this forbes article:
http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/negative-search-google-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0628seo.html
Matt Cutt’s is quoted as saying:
…piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult.
Also according to the article on Forbes:
Cutts also points out that any potential for sabotage exists across all search engines. “It really should be called ‘search engine bowling,’ ”
Unfortunately, it’s not a myth.
I suspect SEOR Forums are not suitable for linking out, they are too good and trusted. Ask DP to run a test for ya? ;)
Skitzzo
“any logic even” – all the logic you need is there.
The fact that you don’t know how to do a tightly controlled test is not suprising.
I get increasingly frustrated at newbies posting poorly researched nonsense as linkbait, and have little interest in training you up on SEO in general, so why not jsut go straight to the source:
Quote from Matt Cutts:
“piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. ”
This topic is now officially dead – next linkbait please.
I read in a SEO/SEM magazine that link farms can cause an issue like this and to stay away from them.
I totally agree, these links don’t hurt websites…webmasters hurt websites. The only occasions I believe there can truly be any damage is the case above where the sites might be on the same C Block….and in the case of site wide ricip links. One recip link might escape the radar…but site wide will probably ring the bell!
There was only one time I asked for a link to be removed…One of my sites was picked up by a porn crawler, and they linked to my main page from over 1000 pages. They hit on a keyword “Baby” in their crawling algo.
I have no idea if there would have been actual damage, but I asked them to remove it for prosperity. I saw the link pretty quickly and they reacted in the same manner….not trying to prove of disprove that theory with a site that’s doing very well. =-)
Melanie
I believe recently someone from Google acknowledged that although difficult, it was possible to trash someone elses rankings this way :(
I have to agree with Hamlet on this one. It’s really about the link profile of the page in question and the rate in which they acquire links. For a site that has a proven diverse fundamentally sound range of IP diversity and anchor text in the links originating from non-linked IP addresses, you can essentially mix this with others types of link building to put on thousands of links in a few weeks with no penalty.
Granted, if you have been steadily building your link momentum and velocity as a result of ramping up. This is like a scraper from blog spot trying to oust the original site for keywords from reproducing an article and lay claim to the keywords and tags. Eventually the algorithm determines where the fluke is, pulls a highlander on them and puts the authority where it belongs. At least, in the examples I have seen on a daily basis for spammy sites trying to throw monkey wrenches.