Published Articles + Spam Links

[Mark_Ch]

Can you be a victim of your own success?

So your write a quality article on your website. You educate your audience and hope quality trusted authority sites will link back to your article. Great, all those plus points adding to your SEO.
On the down side you get poor quality sites with no real SEO value linking to your article.

My Question Is This: What impact will poor quality sites have on your SEO?
What impact will changing the Anchor Text to something unrelated to the article content have on SEO?
Are there any other considerations?
Thanks Mark

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I agree with Devanur.  Just about every site get's scraped and has other poor links to it.  Google knows this.  They are looking for a pattern indicating intent to manipulate the rankings.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Mark,

You have a valid concern here. While we cannot control everyone who links to us, we can take good care that we do not exchange or plant links on web properties that can devalue our website's reputation online. Here I think, the intention is what matters the most. If you do not intentionally build low quality links to your website, you should be in a good shape most of the time.

Having that said, there have been few instances where websites were penalized for something that they never intended to do but, this is very rare. Google can recognize the link building patterns that are intended to manipulate the search rankings. The best thing that we can do is, do the good work by publishing quality content, never get involved in spammy techniques. We don't need to worry much about something that is out of our control. But if you feel that someone is linking to your website and which might have a negative impact on your rankings, you can approach the other party and try to have the link removed and may God forbid, if your site gets penalized for spammy links, you can use the disavow tool and take it from there.

Most of the time, out of my personal experience, if you do not do anything bad intentionally, you won't go down. Just my two cents.

Wish you good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.