Negative backlinks
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Hi I have heard that penguin penalizes a site for bad backlinks. Do you think that it is true? Do you think that is possible for someone to penalize my website adding my link to some spam website? I'm worried that someone could do it...
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Duplicate thread, closing this thread and directing future responses to http://www.seomoz.org/q/negative-backlinks
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To answer your first question - yes, that's kind of one of the big ideas with penguin is that you're going to get penalized if you have a spammy backlink profile.
I've attached a video from Matt Cutts at SMX that talks about this issue...
Matt says that they've tried to build things into penguin that won't allow innocent websites/webmasters to be victims of people trying to attach their websites with negative SEO.
There may be a chance that if you've seen your organic rankings decrease that it's not actually because of negative SEO, but because you do have questionable in-bound links that you have either directly or indirectly acquired.
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