Off-page SEO Google Penalties

You won't get a straight answer here either.

Most people will tell you no - but they're just guessing and using logic like "your competitors could hurt you if it was true".

So don't hold your breath.

I agree with Andy. My husband leads and SEO group and he always inclines to say the second thing you mentioned, that you simply do not get recognized for it. Yet, he also does say that people who do the aggressive link building by using Black hat techniques (which I know you did not mention directly but some people can associate bots with black hat) will eventually see it backfiring.

So, I think you will get an assortment of opinions based on individual perceptions and experiences.

I am an aggressive link builder and these days if I start a new site I pile on as many links as I can as fast as I can.
I have seen one or 2 of my sites go backwards for a while and some people call that the sandbox effect.
However at the end of the day I have several sites showing first page SERP and I beleive that this does not happen without lots of links.
The only exception to this that I have experinced is when the url has the main search term in it for example www. best widgets .com will always have an advantage in a search for widgets I have no 1 page 1 SERP with a few links only using this technique.

Agree with all the above. No-one knows. The most likely is that they will pay scant regard to the extra links. After all they will carry almost zero linkjuice.

Google is very very adept at knowing the marketing tactics people follows, and will continue to make judgements about which ones are acceptable and which ones are excessive. They are not afraid to block big sites, as was shown by BMW's main site being de-indexed a few years ago.

All I can give is my personal experience. Been doing this since 2001, and can tell you--without a doubt--that leaving a footprint of too many IBLS in a certain time frame will cause a reduction in SERPs.

Now, this does NOT include rotating URL ads. Those work fantastic for getting tons of IBLS (thousands) each month with total disregard for a spam foot print.

With that in mind, a static IBL cannot be used the same way. I'd stick to a conservative number. Mine? 20 static IBLS (including blog posts, mind you) per week, but consistently added each week.

Good Luck,
Josh

google has repeatedly said that you can not be penalized for the actions of others. Yet Matt Cutt's says that some of traffic powers customers did in fact get de-indexed. I guess the question is this: was it on page or off page tactics that got them deindexed? I don't know, and Matt does not elaborate.

Aggressive backlinking is NOT the same as BH.

Don't mix white hat resources that can be put to work aggressively, with BH techniques.

No one can tell you for sure BUT logic tells us this:

- OUTSIDE techniques (backlinks) can't hurt your rankings.

That's logic.

Otherwise big players with big bucks would crush competition.

But to say this is guessing... wow. I call it logic.

Guess I better put up or shut up, eh? :-)

It's not getting a lot of links that hurts your site. It's getting a lot of the same anchor text links. If you're trying to rank for "make money" and you get every single link with the word "make money", it's going to get filtered. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. Try it with a keyword that has very little competition, and the exact same thing is going to happen. There's something in Google's algorithm that automatically determines whether the links seem natural. They don't even have to be natural. You can create them yourself, but you need to make it look natural. Getting the same keyword link thousands of times is going to trip a filter.

People like saying how "There's no way I can get a penalty for building thousands of links. My competitor could just do it to me". Well maybe your competitors aren't smart. Because if you throw thousands of the same anchor text keyword links at a site, it's getting filtered.

Do it to new sites = sandbox.

Do it to old established sites with quality high PR backlinks = nothing/improved ranking.

You can get out of the sandbox by building high quality links to your site to pass "trust rank" and it may take anywhere between 1-3 months.

Fact.

The best way is to make sure that everything is relevant and manually build backlinks. Nothing beats manual and relevant! That is the key to ranking #1.

Can competitors harm ranking? - Webmaster Tools Help

Well said Fernando.

I am very interested. Can excessive inbound links really harm? Can joining a link farm harm you?

I don't think there is a penalty for off-paage SEO, UNLESS you are using (abusing) a Bot to perform these task. Moderation is the key, but ultimately there is no penalty.

Just my 2 cents...... 24kWing

If your website 2-3 weeks old - you can kill him by powerfull linkbuilding. For example - Xrumer can. 200.000 bad backlinks from porno sites and your little website goes to ban.

Well, spamming to much with same content can benefit you only for little time, but as soon as you are caught, your rankings will drastically get lower. In my opinion, content is still a king.

I read that but I am also confuse but need to know about it.

Rightly or wrongly Backlinks should not hurt a site in Google. After all, if you look at the number of Backlinks some of the Big Boys have, did they get all those links by fair means? I will leave you to decide this. The Internet used to be an open resource where everyone had the same rights. Sadly, the likes of Google are manipulating things and we have to work within those constraints. The latest Panda and Penguin updates have adversly hit a lot of sites. Yes some of those sites almost certainly deserved to get hit, but a lot did not and some businesses are now hurting or have gone altogether with the loss of jobs. For some of those small business the only option they have to continue is Pay Per Click with Adwords, and of course Google are the winners on that one!! But for some products Adwords is not cost effective, particularly low priced items. For the rest of us, we just carry on and do the best we can.

Not every small business can afford to spend a lot of bucks on professional SEO, and in my own experience, I spent money with a number of supposedly respectable SEO companies and they achieved very little for the money I spent.

Some things dont change when it comes to getting ranked in SERPS:

Good quality unique content
Good Quality Backlinks
Good Quality Article submission

Some where i found the same, but i am still wondering to get the proper answer, If off page can hurt they why we are not linking our competitors there , :confused:

If backlinks cannot hurt a website's rankings, then nobody would be complaining about sites that got hit by Penguin.

Now, sites with high authority, you are not going to harm. You are not going to destroy Amazon's or Best Buy's rankings no matter how much you blast them.

IM'ers little sites though... like I said, if backlinks couldn't hurt rankings, there wouldn't be 4 or 5 new Penguin threads created here everyday.

I had experienced such off-Page penalties (kind of), specially with new sites.

Say, you launched a website and started getting backlinks as soon as possible. That will give you some good ranks on SERP, (As far as Google likes new sites at inital age and rank them in good position). After sometimes, you stop working on it, that really makes Google to suspect about your backlinks and put your site in dustbin (I mean rank drop). It is a kind of penalty. I had experienced this with one of my client's website.

The more poor the site the higher the chance you can hurt them, we have one tiny test site with real poor content and we didn't even test that much on it. Google decided to deindex the whole site, oh well.

Geeze talk about bumping old thread.

Mike is right, little sites can get penalized. Older sites that have huge domain authority you can't though. Go ahead and try it yourself and youll see what im talking about.

Yes, following the Penguin update, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that some off-page SEO can give your site a penalty. This has been proven over and over with regards to blog networks.

I test this out on one of my squidoo lenses. It was PR3 and 2-3 years old. #5 in google for its master search term. Now this test was before "Penguin" but after hitting my site with 10,000 xr links one day and 10,000 sb links the lens dropped to page 4.

I am sure if I kept blasting it google would have no choice but to take a closer look at least.

Anyway I left it alone for a month or so and now it is back to #5