Nasty Backlinks Could Kill Your Reputation

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

I’d like to confirm the backlink question posed at WebProNews recently. Do spammy backlinks hurt you and your Search Engine Optimization efforts?

Yes, they can. But it does take a lot.

Let’s say you run a small business website that is beginning to attract spammy backlinks from porn sites, pharmaceuticals hawkers, and spam blogs. You’d better have a bunch of good links going in because if you don’t then those nefarious backlinks could hurt your reputation in a really bad way. It’s not the value of the links per se; it’s more the quantity of the bad links and the percentage of bad links compared with your good links.

If you have just 10 good links, because you’re a fairly new site, and you start getting hundreds of backlinks that are low quality spam links, porn links, warez sites, and the like, then that won’t look good for you. On the other hand, if you’ve got 30,000 good links and just a thousand or so of these bad links then you’re probably OK because you’ve got so many good links that Google will tend to overlook the bad ones. That’s another reason why inbound links are so important. They’re effective in reputation management and Search Engine Optimization.

Article marketing, off site blogging, directory submissions, and other valid link building strategies should never be abandoned. Get those good, solid links in place before your competition decides to bombard you with bad links. This could be the new trench warfare – competitors killing each other off with sour link juice. Don’t be a victim, be a proactive linker and do it right.

February 27, 2008
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4 Comments
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Link Building

4 Responses to “Nasty Backlinks Could Kill Your Reputation”

Cindy T. says:

February 28, 2008 at 11:25 am

Thanks for that insight Nick. I’ve heard this topic discussed at several conferences and for the most part it is stated that backlinks cannot hurt your site because if they could then your competitors would be using them against you. For the most part I agree however in the case where your “spammy” backlinks far outweigh your “good” backlinks, you could have an issue. Here are some other posts on the topic for anyone who is skeptical.

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/98bbdcf6ace5d8e9/

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014953.html

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006312.html

http://www.semspot.com/2007/12/31/blackhat-linkbombing-to-hurt-your-competitors-new-website/

http://www.seopedia.org/internet-marketing-and-seo/inbound-links-cant-hurt-right-wrong/
T Mosley says:

February 29, 2008 at 2:17 pm

Compelling content, rss feeds, article marketing, posting blog comments, online press release/news releases and driving traffic with the content of your site. I think a lot of folks get caught up in the seo thing that they loose site of what really drives customers to purchase, download content, register or whatever the goal is, don’t get stupid. Develop content.
David Langham says:

March 11, 2008 at 1:02 pm

I do not want my business associated with any of the nasty sites on the net. Is there a way to find out which sites have you as a back link? You can ask them to remove the link, can’t you?
Nick Stamoulis says:

March 11, 2008 at 2:26 pm

Sure, I would recommend that you install Google webmaster tools and watch the links from other sites that link back to you. If for some reason there are nasty links, linking back then I would email those websites directly and ask them to remove their links.