As a SEO I’ve asked myself a lot of times whether it’s possible to harm someone’s domain and rankings by pointing links from a bad neighborhood to them. As Links are key in every search engines alorithm, linkbuilding is not only a powerful tool but could in theory also be used as a powerful weapon. This thought is nothing new and when the question comes up Google’s answer is:
There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. (Source)
If I remember correctly the “almost” was added later to this answer. And this “almost” leads to the continuous question on how badly someone can harm you.
At the SMX West a week ago the question was asked again and Matt Cutts asked every concerned webmaster to write a blog post on his case: “Google reads blogs”. Which does mean nothing less than: Google tries to determine whether a link was placed by the site owner – but of course Google can fail and your website can drop in rankings – maybe you’ll never find the reason (e.g. noindex, follow).
Till now this was kind of a theoretical problem for me. I’ve never seen any live examples of mass linkbuilding to harm someone’s domain (nevertheless I was sure that it exists).
A few months ago the strategy of buying links in eastern europe was discussed in several German seo blogs (Google’s hunt for linkbuyers (English), Abstrafung durch unfairen Linkaufbau mit russischen Links (German)).
Link love from Russia has one big advantage: it’s cheap. For a few bucks you get a PR7 link. But if you buy some of those and Google sees that a big part of your link profile for your German web site is build on links on Russian pages, maybe even containing Cyrillic script, what do you think will happen? Right, they penalize your site. (Source)
After the discussion one point was very clear even to the most naive seo: Never buy links in eastern europe for a western european website.
Guess what? The russian linksellers were not amused.
In a blog hosted in Russia a “Linktzar from Russia” strikes back by blackmailing domains containing negative mentions (German) of this linkbuilding strategy. First reaction in the German blogosphere was the belief that this has to be a bad joke.
It wasn’t.
(As I’m not going to write a book here I’ll only show one example ;-))
The German blog Internetente published a post on the 22nd of January titled “Oktoberrevolution in der Seo Szene“. Shortly after posting the article the domain appeared in the blackmailing list. Now – one month later a search for backlinks (Source: SISTRIX Toolbox) of Internetente shows the following profile:
24.4% of link-giving host-popularity and 8.8% of all incoming links from Russia. I bet that not a single .ru-link was placed by the site owners.
Three examples of russian domains linking to Internetente are shown below (http://a-k-c.ru/rectuiting167 => “Black Hat SEO”, http://01ru.info/10/15.htm => “Black Hat SEO”, http://auto-zapravki.ru/2008/01/ => “Link kaufen” – “Buy Links”):
I don’t want to construct a worst-case-scenario – however the “visibility index” provided by SISTRIX for this domain shows a strong decrease during the last month. Of course the fluctuations in the past and the timeframe of only a few weeks don’t proof anything. But who says that there’s no connection between a decreased visibility and the russian links?
Especially if you earn your living with your website it’s inadmissible and frightening that someone could have the power to harm you in this way.
UPDATE 21. Feb. 2009:
Take a look at the screenshot below. A search on Google.de for “Black Hat SEO” (for sites without “Black Hat SEO” in the title) shows a list of blogs and sites which are on the above mentioned blackmailing list. Google counts the links. Number one is a portal which aggregates German law blogs.
So – what’s the conclusion? How exactly can Google ensure that the concerned domains won’t loose trust in Google’s eyes? Do we need a contact form in webmaster central for this?
What’s your opinion?
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Great article. As Google tends to be not too fast on some issues the russian links might really have a negative impact on some innocent sites. At least for a while. Crossing fingers for the webmasters concerned the while will be short…
Just imagine that someone uses all his energy to get you a penalty. Of course Google can find ways to cluster “bad links” and exclude them – however there might be lots of ways to do it in a more advanced way.
What about getting the top-keywords from your competitor, use them as an anchor text on thousands of links? To a certain extent this may increase your rankings – right before a penalty sends you to the bottom of the result pages..
No really, it is just not possible to harm some competitor by buying mass linking from E Europe. At the worst, those links will be ignored by Google. Nobody can get penalized (drop in PR) just because of mass buying of links even if proved to Google. Because it is easy to fake proof for a competitor showing they are trying to buy links.
Google is not ignoring the links. Take a look at the screenshot above. If sites are listed in the search results for “Black Hat SEO” due to the Russian links – they have a value.
At some point there might be automated penalties because of “too much” links from abroad. Or there might be a penalty for certain keywords because of too much “anchor text spamming” for these keywords. You never know – you’re just assuming (as I am ;-))
Funny thing. We published the article with alike title. And it’s about linkbuilding too. http://webprojects.ru/russiansem/