Opinions Wanted: Links Can Get Your Site Penalized?

[AnthonyMangia]

I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal.

When I initially read this article, I was happy.  It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again.  The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz.

Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue.  There seems to be a few different opinions:

• The SEOmoz opinion that bad links can't hurt except for when they get devalued.
• The idea that you wouldn't be penalized algorithmically, but a manual penalty is within the realm of possibility.
• The idea that both manual and algorithmic penalties were a factor.

Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about.  I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point.  It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that.

What do you guys think?  Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other?  Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another?  Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept?  I'm curious to hear your responses.

[StalkerB]

The post seems to have been updated with a retraction of sorts, saying that it's rare but can happen, which is my stance (indeed I mentioned it in a question a couple of days ago).

I actually think it's more rare now than it used to be, but there was a time when you could do a lot of harm to someone by pointing these bad links at them.

Alas I'm not going to be able to back that up with any solid examples, because I was too much of a n00b and on the fringes of SEO when I first learned about it 4 or 5 years ago and it's not something I've been a participant in myself since.

EDIT: What I will say though is we're not talking about getting low quality sites pointing links in to you, that's almost never likely to harm you. Pharmacy links, malware, spyware, paid networks and such like which can be traced back to an offending site are more along the lines you want to think about.

Spending time setting that kind of thing up and putting just the right amount of effort into making it difficult, but not impossible, to trace to a competitor was the sort of thing people were being paid a decent amont of money to do.

[RyanKent]

Anthony,

I understand exactly what you are asking. If it is indeed true that "bad" links can't hurt, why not get every link I possibly can and if it gets devalued, no big deal.

It is my belief that bad links can hurt your site. I recognize that is not necessarily a popular belief, and may not be the official belief of SEOmoz, but I still maintain this belief and act upon it. Why?

1. It makes sense to me, and is in alignment with other actions I have seen Google and SE's take.

2. It can be acted upon algorithmically. If your site adds a significant percentage of new links, and those links are identified as "bad" by Google, they could simply discount all new links and not just the bad ones. They could also flag your site for a manual review.

3. I have seen numerous reports such as this one where a person has stated they were informed by Google of an issue with their sites links.

I would offer the above as my thoughts. It is not SEO fact by any means. I would simply suggest to those desiring to improve SEO to focus on providing value to their site's visitors and not attempt to manipulate the system.