Google cannot penalize spam links to money site.. unless

Hi, I like to make controversial statement. I don't think google can penalize spam links to your money site, unless they are 100% sure it is from a paid source (like BMR..).

Why? imagine this scenario, happens a lot. Someone drops a link at your blog or your forum, and blasts it away with all they got. Would your site be penalized? If I can figure out this scenario, I am sure google can too.
So I think they would simply discount those links. Their algo has to establish a under-the-table relationship before they can penalize.

Your logic is flawed.

What would stop a competitor from utilizing a service like BMR and pointing links to your site? Nothing.
What is the difference between buying a Fiverr or Xrumer/Scrapebox blast, and signing up for BMR? Nothing.
What's to say someone doesn't buy blatant paid links and points it at competitors websites?

The point is, if negative SEO works, it can't be isolated to the theory you just proposed. At the end of the day Google has NO clue who's behind buying links to a website.

True that you can do neg-seo with BMR. You can also buy obvious paid links and point them to your competitors.

Those are special cases, and google loves - but has a hard time- dealing with on a large scale (sure, they can zap BMR).

But once google has happily de-indexed BMR's of the world, how can they be sure that a blast to the page is not to strengthen those links on it, and not for the benefit of the page owner? I am always thinking of blasting my links on another site, and everyone else is. Surely google can see that - why would they penalize the site owner? This is too common. It is not neg-seo either; it is strengthening the links on that page.

The theory is not entirely without merit. I don't believe it's true, but it's not without merit. IF it is true, it would mean that velocity is a lot more important than anyone previously realized.... which pretty much goes right back to Google penalizing for spammy links, lol.

i have a site with great content that didnt use BMR and other networks. I simply used blog comments.

It dropped about 100-200 places after penguin.

The on-page is fine, it was my backlinks which did it.

BLIXX said:

The theory is not entirely without merit. I don't believe it's true, but it's not without merit. IF it is true, it would mean that velocity is a lot more important than anyone previously realized.... which pretty much goes right back to Google penalizing for spammy links, lol.

Click to expand...

Instead of "penalizing" I suggest discounting

Velocity - very important, but I don't know how goog deals with pages that all of a sudden catch fire. Maybe then they look at the "spam rating" of backlinks to adjust the velocity funnel.

Negative SEO is a real thing for more then 1-2 years,so your theory is down

acotut said:

Negative SEO is a real thing for more then 1-2 years,so your theory is down

Click to expand...

I thought it is a recent phenom. I am not familiar with neg-seo cases, specially going back.

Do they result in google dance, or permanent demotion. Do you have any references on this?

Regardless, I hope MattC is reading, since positive blasting to your link does the same.

Example a batch of sites have SB blast directly to the money site and some got dropped and some gained rank


One of the site tht got directly SB blast have dropped from top 3 to page 2
After the PR update the site went from PR0 - PR1 and now back to top 5 again

blackieman said:

Instead of "penalizing" I suggest discounting

Click to expand...

Actual penalties and link devaluations are different things, though. Your thread title specifically references penalties, so this statement is probably something of a red herring (unintended, I'm guessing ).

Despite the mass ignorance of what is and is not an actual penalty and a link devaluation, each are what they are. (For example, link devaluations/de-indexings are easy to spot in ahrefs; penalties have things such as no longer ranking first for one's brand name associated with them every time).

Velocity - very important, but I don't know how goog deals with pages that all of a sudden catch fire. Maybe then they look at the "spam rating" of backlinks to adjust the velocity funnel.

Click to expand...

Many signals and meta-signals can't really be manipulated in the aggregate of what Google considers in its rankings; this is why neg SEO, for example, is really only possible in specific, low-authority/limited-metric circumstances and nothing for the majority of people to panic about. Further, Google can compare and contrast intra-niche averages (as well as draw relevant data from inter-niche averages) and draw conclusions from that, as well.

Or... Maybe the deindexing of the network was what caused drops in rankings since the value of all of those links disappeared at once.

Atleast in BMR's example, something that appeared as a penalty was nothing more than a mass devaluing of a backlink profile almost overnight. If a websites backlink profile was built on this foundation, there's no doubt that a website would see significant drops in rankings after the deindexing.

Now, I'm not saying that negative SEO doesn't exist. It does. But in the case of BMR, its likely the result of devalued links than a penalty.

Exactly, how can Google penalize webmaster if a tactic they use could be used against them in a malacious manner to hurt their ranking. If buying links can hurt ones ranking then I could buy links for all my competitors and hurt them. They have no way of telling who is buying what.

Google is very careful in wording their announcements and for long they have maintained that negative SEO is impossible, even in the recent post by matt cutts, he was talking about the on-page over optimization and irrelevant links and not about building a backlink profile.

I have blasted my personal blog through xrumer and scrapebox directly and to junk pages.. nothing happened and rankings are still intact.

With the BMR, what happened was the devaluing of links (and hence a fall in ranking) rather than a penalty.. the penalty happened only for the BMR sites which had irrelevant links for the content.

I am not saying negative seo doesn't exist. We do get mails from webmaster tools about unnatural linking, but negative seo is not something that we need to worry about if we do the other things right..