Case Study: Testing the effects of excessive backlinking

Can you please show us a graph of the progress?

I assume that since you've been asking us for backlinks, that you have solid records of the keyword performance.

johndea said:

Can you please show us a graph of the progress?

I assume that since you've been asking us for backlinks, that you have solid records of the keyword performance.

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If you read the thread it states the performance and there's also a ranking report.

The keywords have dropped to the back pages for google for over a month now.

So up to now, the conclusion is that excessive backlinking can destroy a site. However, like I said, we need to wait for months to see if the keywords do actually come back.

subscribing to hear what happens anyway perfect case study to figure what BIG G likes regarding backlinks

with that many links hitting a site in this short of time its for sure to be penalized. i hope it was fun lol

There is a thread on the forum here someone who religiously built sites and saw that even when doing an exsessive amount of backlinking--even if the site got sandboxed, that if he continued down that path and stuck with it Google would re-index the site down the line. It might take months, but it would show back up, and his rank would climb again.

The poster of that thread hypothesized that Google wants to see an extended effort to show that the webmaster of the site is serious about his SEO efforts, and not just spamming the world with link backs.

I suspect you might see, or have been seeing the same thing with your efforts here.

I also suspect that this aspect of Google will never change--it is human nature to want things right now. But the best things in life come through extended and diligent effort regardless of the obstacles in the way. This is Google's way of weeding out the losers and rewarding those who with an extended effort stick with their strategies.

Of course there are thousands of variables involved here including the quality of the links and how the linking is done bh or wh etc. but the concept imo will always be the same--an extended dedicated effort will reap rewards.

Keep us updated , even if it could be months until your site comes out of oblivion. It would be useful to see what the pattern of coming OUT of the sandbox is , as well.

My contribution: the site that I mentioned earlier in this thread, it is now out of the "oblivion", but is out out of the sandbox altogether? Because it is on page 10, even though all onpage/offpage optimization is far better than no 1 rankings (generally just subpages, product pages etc, PR0 pages) while my page is PR3.

gorang said:

If you read the thread it states the performance and there's also a ranking report.

The keywords have dropped to the back pages for google for over a month now.

So up to now, the conclusion is that excessive backlinking can destroy a site. However, like I said, we need to wait for months to see if the keywords do actually come back.

Click to expand...

Good work anyway gorang. Theres a case study some where on the forum which had success with a similar blast on a brand new site. I think the problem wasnt the blast time frame due to competition analysis but I think it was a clash between the fluctuation amount of anchor text which was two main keywords to the home page plus another page that might of been the flag.

I've found one of your links (by accident ) and there was a misspelling in the anchor text! I wonder how many were sent like that...
It was from an SB blast.

mmmmm, thanks for the share, so many SB blast these days, but it all seems to go down in the hole if you overdo it

Wow, if this is the deal, then,
a new REVOLUTIONARY service should be launch.
and call it.

Website Killing.

so what happened here, any updates?

benjarvie said:

what is dripable - a drip feed ping site... ?

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You can see the site @ http://www.dripable.com

Interesting case study thus far, let us know if you need any help with our platform!

gorang said:

I think i've misinterpreted what has been happening.

I thought that when the keyword dropped and the page that is being displayed in the results changed, it was because Google didn't know which page to rank. But i've realized that actually, Google is refusing to rank the homepage(the page that was blasted), which is why other pages are being displayed instead.

I think this makes more sense. It is just a waiting game now to see if it comes back.

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I've been reading through your thread; very interesting. As I was reading through I discovered your theory that when Google decides to rank a subpage instead of the homepage, it means your rankings have been damanged. This was concerning and worrying to me because I have pages where I've got both the homepage and a subpage ranking for a particular keyword, and worried if that was bad and I was just lucky.

However, this makes more sense, and a good example of the sorts of penalties your receive. Your ranking dropped because your subpages don't have the same power as your homepage, so it doesn't get the same ranking.

yosh001 said:

Wow, if this is the deal, then,
a new REVOLUTIONARY service should be launch.
and call it.

Website Killing.

Click to expand...

This is something I am very interested in. However, what I want to test is "website killing" for real, authority websites. So, say, blasting a local company website with backlinks. Now, obviously I think you'd fail at losing them rankings for keywords related to their business name. However, what about blasting them for other keywords. It is one thing to kill a niche website. It is another to kill a local website, especially one that has Google Place Reviews. If I can ever get my act together I have every intention of starting a case study on this.

For now though, it is probably easier to outrank a competitor than to kill them. This has taken a long time and it is still very uncertain what the future will be. For people that try to "kill" websites that have things such as bad reviews, your best bet is to probably create 10 websites with positive reviews and just rank the front page yourself, those keywords will be untargeted so easy pickings.

I wonder if this test would/could resulted in the way it did because of the niche itself. I have a website in the same niche, although I target many different keywords, and the serps are going crazy.

I've not been building links for a while. The site had "hemorrhoid symptoms" at position 154. I have now used one of looplines AA lists on the sites. Which has created about 20-40k links across 2k domains. The ULRL which was being listed has changed to another page again for "hemorrhoid symptoms" and is now listed at 827

My sites are also in the oblivion, and they have been since 6 months ago. Therefore, so far, excessive backlinking = not so good...

Hopefully one day they will bounce back.

jb2008 said:

My sites are also in the oblivion, and they have been since 6 months ago. Therefore, so far, excessive backlinking = not so good...

Hopefully one day they will bounce back.

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I had a very old ugly site which was slapped many years ago. I kept hold of it and about a year ago out of nowhere it regained its rankings and started earning money again.

So keep hold of the site and build some links every couple of months see what happens.

hemorrhoid symptoms: position 110 in Google.com
hemorrhoid treatments: position 126 in Google.com

Again, each Google listing is for a sub-page. But throughout the case study, we have been building links to the homepage.

So to me, that points to a penalty of some sort for the homepage. It seems as though Google is refusing to rank the homepage.

What do you guys think?

The problem with this case study is that other case studies currently on BHW show that excessive backlinking is ok. But the other studies really don't show exactly how many links have been created or more detail on the site.

Either way, it seems that the hemorrhoid site I used is in a penalty.

gorang said:

I had a very old ugly site which was slapped many years ago. I kept hold of it and about a year ago out of nowhere it regained its rankings and started earning money again.

So keep hold of the site and build some links every couple of months see what happens.

Click to expand...

I experienced the same thing.

Some of my old (2 years+) websites are so rubbish that I am amazed Google is ranking them again. The only criteria seems to be age. The content is poor by all measures - single page web 2.0 properties.

I'm having great success at the moment by sending a few hundred links per week at older websites I own, even in niches like gambling.

New websites seem to be having a harder time, and some of the old stuff - even without new backlinking efforts - is coming back strong.

On my main niche, I have seen many competitors frustrated as they can't seem to shift my crappy page from position 1 - I can see that they are using blasting tactics.

Blasting has its place I am sure, but it looks like you have to pick your moment well.

Respect for reporting on this Gorang, this is what BHW is all about.

Well, I checked today and my site has recovered, it's now in the SERPs on page 4. I'm not sure if it is still sandboxed or not because given the competition I expected it to come out really strongly, i.e. page 1. I find it strange because it has hundreds of PR3-PR7 ******** links. It's also been risen to PR3 on the last update.