You are not penalised for bad sites linking to you, if 100 sites that were of poor quality decided to link to your site, you have no control over it, which is why you are not penalised. Linking out to bad sites however is a different matter that can bring penalties

Better to improve you link building techniques and be sure to link build that are related to your site you can't do any thing on the bad links you have the only way to remove them for the list is to cover them of good back links.

Nope: Read it three times, still no idea what it says.

Originally Posted by jj1

If your site can be damaged by low quality backlinks, then what's to stop someone getting lots of spammy backlinks to a competitor's site and knocking them out of the serps???

The argument I've read is that links TO your site can't damage you; links OUT can.

Not sure if that's true?????

Do you remember a "miserable failure" joke few years ago? What do you think how it's made?

Basically, I would suggest you to just concentrate on getting more and more quality and high ranked backlinks. Whatever happened with the old links, does not matter until you keep getting more backlinks.

Forget, what ever the bad link you have got, reanalyze your site and try to fresh content regular basis then you will get good result.

Originally Posted by igorsa

Do you remember a "miserable failure" joke few years ago? What do you think how it's made?

With links of course.


HOWEVER that does NOT "damage" your site, it simply makes it appear in SERPs for a phrase that nobody really uses to look for YOUR pages.

It does NOT diminish your pages for the phrases that real customers are likely to use.


Stop fretting about such trivialities, such things are few and far between and it is because they do happen infrequently is why they make Internet "headlines".

There is nothing you can do, if you are going back on rankings then you should concentrate more on building links. Instead of wasting time on deleting them try to build more better links.

I think you cant do anything for removing those old bad backlinks. The only way is contacting them that you have did it but they didnt respond you.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Backlinks are backlinks, just leave them alone. They are probably of little use anyway but you can never tell.
AND pages that link to yours don't "hurt" your pages.

Stop messing about with things you can't change and concentrate on things you can!

Greetings,

I wanted to pop in and comment. As of February, a few (very few) links from outside sites can hurt your ranking in Google. Mainly if they are coming from the same IP C block (multiple sites on same server linking to one another).

I bet if you do some research you will find that Alta Vista, Yahoo etc. Show more back links than Google does because it is no longer counting them, so don't panic. This is not a really bad thing that you have all these links. Most, if not all of them, will not cause a problem. Google simply is not going to count them in your favor unless they are from related sites, see?

Google is not going to punish you because of many links because that would allow a competitor to put you out of business simply by placing massive links to your site, see? So dont worry about the old links and as stated here, work on getting good relevant links from here out. More so, work on fine tuning your pagge to follow the rules! There are worse infractions you can do for your ranking on the site than anywhere else. It takes a bit of knowledge of the rules to know what is good vs. bad within the code and design. That is the key factor.

From here on out, it is extremely important to only have back links from relevant/related sites. Google is making moves to remove web spam, and this means that if you have links to your site, especially from know link farms, your rankings may drop for a time because these unrelated links are no longer scored in your favor and simply ignored.

I am already noticing a huge difference in search results. Wherein the results are not only more relevant to my search, but also that the sites up top have quality content. In the long term, this is going to be good. What we need to focus on now is making certain the pages are playing by the rules, no dirty tricks (this is also part of the new update) word density (Too much focus on keywords will kill your rankings as it looks fishy to the search engine) and making sure our content is balanced, well thought out, and that its populated with just the right amount of info related to the searches we wish to rank under. Its not an easy task, but not impossible. In the last week I moved a site from #80 to the first page, and I am shooting for #1 in it's genre so it's not impossible. Just takes a plan! A good one!

For more information on this, Google the topic: Panda Update

In retrospect, I always had a gut feeling that using back links, rather than well planned and written content, was going to bite me hard. I mean really, its just a matter of common sense with a little bit of ethics mixed in. I have one site with 276 links in, of which about 237 (from sites without relevant/related content) just dropped out of Google's scoring. I am not going to worry about that and only focus on getting good links from related sites that have good content. One good link, its worth a 100 times of a 1000 bad ones in this game.

It's a bad deal for some, and will hurt the spammers. You know, when you do a search for "Ice Cream Cone" and a "Get Rich Selling Monkey Wrenches" shows up. those guys. But this is awesome for the web and all of us in the long run. Sadly, some folks will suffer badly due to this change and the shady practices of some in the past. So move over shady's! Those who provide quality work and good content win in the end!

Take care, and good luck everyone. The game is a foo.. er.. content!

No more, Mr. Spam guy!!

I have sent a letter to to site admin, and have prepared a copy of my post as well as this thread to blog. I do not know why you thought it professional to be so rude, however, Moderators have an obligation to behave with manners. I think an apology is in order, don't you? Never have I seen such rudeness. That was purely unethical and looks very bad on Freelancer.

Blatantly removing a post is irresponsible and unprofessional sir. That info was not meant for you, it was meant for the OP. And it was presented well, and that is most likely why you deleted it with a rude comment.

Be more responsible please. The least you could have done is explain why, not make a rude comment. You sir are obviously a someone with a great void of social skills.

Well, go on then if you want you "knowledge" to be put down publicly, it ain't a problem for me!.

Originally Posted by WebITNorthwest

I wanted to pop in and comment. As of February, a few (very few) links from outside sites can hurt your ranking in Google. Mainly if they are coming from the same IP C block (multiple sites on same server linking to one another).

IP classing has NOT existed since 1993 which is before current search engines were even developed.

Originally Posted by WebITNorthwest

I bet if you do some research you will find that Alta Vista, Yahoo etc. Show more back links than Google does because it is no longer counting them, so don't panic. This is not a really bad thing that you have all these links. Most, if not all of them, will not cause a problem. Google simply is not going to count them in your favor unless they are from related sites, see?

Alta Vista and Yahoo! are one and the same thing and have been for EIGHT years. And Yahoo! and Google show different backlink counts because they are DIFFERENT search engines with different indexes and different algorithms. Link counting has always been a waste of time, no engine has EVER displayed the link they know about, and the ones they do show are NOT necessarily the one that count.

Originally Posted by WebITNorthwest

From here on out, it is extremely important to only have back links from relevant/related sites. Google is making moves to remove web spam, and this means that if you have links to your site, especially from know link farms, your rankings may drop for a time because these unrelated links are no longer scored in your favor and simply ignored.

You have no control over who links to your pages And "relevant" links are for human beings NOT search engines

So may I "respectfully" suggest that you cease from repeating TEN year old "facts" that were not true even then, and bring yourself up to date and see what is happening NOW.

And of course you may like to consider that before you reopened this thread it was started ONE YEAR AGO and the last post had bee TEN MONTHS previously!!!

Originally Posted by WebITNorthwest

I have sent a letter to to site admin, and have prepared a copy of my post as well as this thread to blog. I do not know why you thought it professional to be so rude, however, Moderators have an obligation to behave with manners. I think an apology is in order, don't you? Never have I seen such rudeness. That was purely unethical and looks very bad on Freelancer.

Wow. You're going to write the admins, and blog about it? That's truly frightening. What could look bad upon Freelancer is allowing the drivel you posted here, that I'm sorry to say I wasted the time to read, to remain. Moderators have an obligation to remove such fluff from threads, and in my opinion should have remained gone. You should apologize to all of us for wasting our time.

Originally Posted by WebITNorthwest

Blatantly removing a post is irresponsible and unprofessional sir. That info was not meant for you, it was meant for the OP. And it was presented well, and that is most likely why you deleted it with a rude comment.

Be more responsible please. The least you could have done is explain why, not make a rude comment. You sir are obviously a someone with a great void of social skills.

Some people you don't have to lampoon, you just have to quote them. Good information? Chris actually took the time to refute it, which is more attention than I'd have given you. I'd have already banned you for reposting it and wasting our time further complaining. I personally tire of SEO "experts" who constantly litter the forum with uneducated garbage posing as advice, but took it as a given when the SEO subforums were put at page top, front page they would act as a magnet for such. I am thankful mods like Chris prune the worst of it.

Be responsible, please. Learn more about current SEO prior to posting. As in SEO, how you present it is far less important than RELEVANT CONTENT.

Thank you, WITlessNorthwest, for the laugh.

Back to the site with the problem, I'd reiterate the importance of sorting out the site itself. If yiou only have 20% of your pages catalogued then you're doing something (I suspect several things) very wrong. Even if many of the missing 12,000 are unadulterated crap I'd expect a few to have been found. Time for a complete site overhaul.