Opinion regarding SEO Sabotage

[johnshearer]

Hello Mozcommunity,

I would like opinions regarding potential spammy inbound links from others .

In theory you would want excellent useful content on your site that other web properties would link to in a natural way..link bait.

But what if links were pointing to your site with malicious intent. For example a competitor bombs yours site with spammy/black hat links.

This is clearly a dilemma for search engines since anyone can link to your site...even though you can block incoming with .access I don't believe many smaller in-house seo teams (or do it yourself small business owners) use Google analytics to routinely monitor referring sources.

[ShaMenz]

Hey Will,

Very cool to see you dropping by on the Q&A

Sha

[johnshearer]

Will thanks I was trying to give you the "good answer" tag but I guess i can only use three.

Can you name examples of "sadly, often it was the company itself"...just kidding.

[johnshearer]

Sha, great article thanks for posting...

[willcritchlow]

There's been a lot of controversy back and forth on this. I have definitely seen sites get hurt by link profiles that competitors could have built (sadly, often it was the company itself). However - I have only seen this for pretty weak sites (as others have said). I have not yet seen a case where a strong site with a natural link profile got hurt by competitors. I wouldn't spend an awful lot of time worrying about it.

[irvingw]

The less quality natural links you have the easier it is for a competitor to sabotage you. Brand new sites can definitely be sabotaged, but well established sites are almost impossible to take down because it's a good to bad incoming link ratio. Good SEO's always keep an eye on who is linking to them for this reason and vet their incoming links on a monthly or so basis.

[ShaMenz]

Hi John,

I would suggest reading this recent post from Justin Briggs to understand how Search engines identify spammy links and why they will not hurt you if your site has a strong natural link profile. Better Understanding Link-Based Spam Analysis Techniques.

Sha

[STPseo]

In this case you may want to shoot Google a note with some examples and see what they say. At the very least you'll have some documentation that it was something you were worried about.

[Websensejim]

It can't be that easy, otherwise everyone (well maybe not everyone) would be doing it. Google's official line on this has always been that inbound links from bad sites can't hurt you. I'd like to believe that, we all would. But this is still a grey area and there's enough contradictory evidence out there. Take this for example :

http://searchengineland.com/google-webmaster-notifications-for-bad-links-pointing-at-your-site-84265

Near the end of the Google notification it says "If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request".

How does Google know which of your inbound links you were "unable to control" ?

[fraserhannah]

I wondered about this too, we have noticed tragic coming from some very spammy websites, and have no idea why they linked to us.