Any recent discoveries or observations on the "Official Line" of incoming link penalization?

[SteveOllington]

I know this is always a contentious issue and that the official, or shall we say semi-official line is that you can't be penalized for incoming links, as you can't control who links to you (aside of course from link buying, and other stuff that Google feels it can work out).

I was wondering if anyone had any recent discoveries or observations on this?

Obviously there's the problem that is usually brought up where you could damage a competitor buy link building to them with spammy links, etc... hence the half denial of it being an issue... but has anyone seen or hear anything on it recently, or experienced something relevant?

[Dan-Petrovic]

There is absolutely no mystery about whether inbound links can harm you or not. Apparently Google is very good at determining whether it was you buying links or somebody trying to sabotage you. I had a chat with Tiffany from Google's web spam team at SMX in Sydney and she said that there has been no cases when they got it wrong when they issue penalties.

I have a different theory however. To get penalised you need to demonstrate consistent link buying pattern over time. What typically happens is that SEO people buy high PageRank links only with very closely matched anchor text. Often these links are sold to other webmasters with different site topics. This is very easy for Google to spot.

What happens though is that during this process the rankings will shoot up like crazy and if you were to try and sabotage your competitor you would have helped them in the process and also spent an incredible amount of money. All that for them to submit a reconsideration request to Google and be out of jail within weeks.

As far as I know attempts at cheap forms of link spam in order to penalise competitors have so far been unsuccessful.

[fenderseo]

I read an anecdotal account on a less than savory SEO-related site in the last week or so about someone who blasted a competitor's site with spammy links, and they said they noticed a drop in the competitors SERP rankings...but that within a week the competitor was actually back on the first page, and ranking higher than they were before.

Obviously there are a million variables that could affected that outcome, but I enjoyed reading it knowing that the person trying to sabotage their competitor actually ended up further "behind," when they could have spent their time doing something constructive for their own site.

[SteveOllington]

Ah cool, thanks Dejan. I didn't realise they'd started being so much more open about it all. All the stuff I ever found tended to go around the questions rather than actually answer them lol.

I don't get how the algo could tell the difference though, between if I went out and built a whole bunch of spammy links to my own site or to somebody elses, so surely the resulting rankings from doing that would be the same. Meaning, if the competitors get a boost like that... link spam is worth doing on your own site, and then you could just submit a re-inclusion if you got caught and blame it on sabotage.

[SteveOllington]

Yeah that's pretty cool, but still leaves that same question hanging there though... does link spam in fact work well, and if so, what are Google going to do about it... because inevitably is something works, it will get used.

[bemcapaz]

Actually, this makes a lot of sense. Probly there are many spammers doing this already?

[SteveOllington]

There definitely are and have been for a long time... I was one of them for a while, I linked spammed with software to get sites up. That is until I realized what proper SEO was, and how much better it is, especially in the long term. That's just the problem though... it did work to a certain extent, but it came with its problems.