Can backlinks negatively influence your ranking, or worse, cause a penalty?

[jeroenpf]

Hello everbody!

I am the owner of a price compare website and have been running it succesfully for over two years now. However, since february the news and articles section of our website lost a great deal of it's traffic. We did not completely lose traffic but only for items that were posted after february 2011. We have skilled content writers who do good research on the topics covered in our news section, i can honestly say we write our content for our visitors and not just for the search engines.

We have investigated every part of our source code but we did not find anything there that was violating any guidelines. So my next guess was that maybe some incoming links could harm our news section. The most backlinks we receive are directed to our news and article section. These links are generally put on sites which use our RSS feed. There is just one website that we think could be the reason. It had included our RSS feed on each page which resulted in over 2,500,000 backlinks from a single domain which hosts a very poor quality website. We never considered it to be harmfull so we never did anything about it. My question is if this case could be the reason for the drop in traffic?

kind regards,

Jeroen from the Netherlands

[Theo-NL]

The (in)famous Google Panda update (thousands of posts on Google about this) struck international websites on the 24th of February, right in the same month where you reported the problems started. Perhaps the drop is traffic is a result of this update and not of the backlinks?

Regarding those links: I think a single website that links to you (be it with millions of links) probably won't be the cause of this drop. Unless, these backlinks were put in place close to (before) the date where the traffic started dropping. Have you tried contacting the website that has those links up and request them to remove your site from their system?

[StephanM]

If that were true, it would be possible to take out a competitor by setting up a link campaign to their website. I do not believe Google would allow such a thing to happen, so while I'm not 100% certain I think it's safe to say bad inlinks will not harm you. I must admit though, the two observations (dropping search engine traffic and a huge amount of bad inlinks) do seem rather coincidental, especially taking in account that the Panda update hit in February.

[blackballonline]

I would suggest researching the traffic sources in detail if possible to see if a referring site dropped thus causing your decline. Maybe they got hit with the update and not your site.

[jeroenpf]

Thanks for all your answers

@Theo & @StephanM: My website is not international, it's a dutch website (http://goo.gl/9nwq9) so i think it cannot be the panda update because i heard they did not launch it in Europe yet or did they? However, 24 february is almost the exact date the drop in traffic initiated.

As for the website that uses our RSS feed, we blocked the feed for that particular website. Not only because our suspicions but also because they loaded the feed on every single page request. We know it is not a popular website because over a course of 1,5 years we only received 40 visitors from that domain while the links to our website were clearly visible on each page.

Still i think it's weird that our old articles are doing just fine and only the new articles are affected. Also, the rest of the website is ranking as usual.

@Dave: Good point, it could be that the refering site got a penalty that devalued the links to our website thus causing a drop in ranking and traffic. I'm not sure if they had a penalty before we noticed the drop in traffic, im quite sure they have one now. But looking at the amount of traffic we received from them over a period of 1.5 years i suspect they always had a penalty but again i'm not sure.

[SteveOllington]

Dejan's answer on this thread will help you with this question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/any-recent-discoveries-or-observations-on-the-official-line-of-incoming-link-penalization

[jeroenpf]

Thanks Steve.

That clears things up for us. It would be great if the backlinks were indeed the cause of the drop but unfortunately now we have to keep on searching for an other answer