Trash or bad neighborhood links can hurt your over all search engine ranking-we all know about the fact!But when this question comes to Google or Matt Cutts they always made a note,that Google do not count trash links for any website! Google posted a note on Google webmaster central blog for favor of this question “Can competitors harm ranking?”
Here is a latest discussion on the topic WebmasterWorld, where some webmaster made some statement over the issue and everyone is aware about the fact that, negative seo works and it can hurt a small or midsize website.I do agree on the same point, that if someone invest money on cross linking or trash linking for a specific business competitor over Google, then definitely it will have some negative effect even for good ranking website,specially while Panda is a active algorithm to trace the trash back links.So think about JC penny,if some one bought the links without knowing them, and Google panda victimize them with out a single notification,then who is responsible for that?As we know within couple of $$ we can get thousands of trash links and its quite easy, but if it works for a innocent website and victimized by the panda then it would be big threat for all the webmaster’s and Google too.
I have never seen a website’s rankings suffer damage from “bad neighborhood” backlinks. Google understands that you have little control over them, and discounts them accordingly. If you have links on your site pointing to bad sits, of course that will mess you up.
If you did experience a drop in ranks that you believe is due to a competitor’s actions, you can contact Google Support. It may take them awhile, but they can (and usually will) take some action.
Hi,Max
Good to see your opinion here..but for a new or small website, spam links can harm some how, if the webmaster’s are not aware about the fact we all know that negative seo investment on a move for a long time!
Why would I spend money to hurt people than improve my website ranking??
I had some nice friendly competitor enter my URL into a spam link network of .edu sites.
I did have a PR4 before this was done but that fell to PR3. When I was PR4 I had about 150 IBLs. When PR3 i had over 10,000
Only the PageRank fell. My SERPs were not affected.
best,
Reg
NBS-SEO.com
Hi,Reg
I missed your comment’s for a long time…..its been informative experience that, spam link didn’t hurt your SERP, but for mine its been bad experience where few Chinese crappy blog spam demoted few good ranking of client,we got recovery from this spam..after three month’s hard work!
Cheers!
Anirban