Google Penalising links from Link Farm Evolution?

Hey guys,

I've been struggling for along time trying to figure out why one of my sites has not been ranking consistently since launching it a year ago.

I've cleaned it up but it still won't rank. That got me to thinking about the Link Farm Evolution blast I did on it when I first launched the site.

After reading this, http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 it got me thinking...

What if Google has determined that the WPMU hosts that LFE uses are link farms and places a penalty on them. They probably also figured out that any link from these domains pointing to another site was most likely created by the site owner. Therefore the site owner who used LFE inadvertently caused a penalty on the very site they were trying to get a backlink for.

Would my only salvation be to delete all the blogs I created with LFE?

Does any of this make sense? Does anyone agree or disagree?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this...

Common "internet theory" (and this has been mentioned by google many times before) is that "external links can not cause a minus to a website"

Logic often quoted is that if they did, it would be too easy for people to blast a competitor's site right out of the SERPs.

Most of the issues quoted on the document are about factors where you're linking out - ie putting links to crappy sites somewhere. (since google knows that only you (or a hacker) could have put these there, it's better able to judge.

That being said, I personally (and this is just my opinion, no data to back it up) think that for new sites, that aren't ranked and don't yet have any real "competition", that building spammy links is a negative - theoretically, since nobody yet "knows" or is "competing" with your site, having a large number spammy of links appear could be considered a negative.

Fwiffo said:

That being said, I personally (and this is just my opinion, no data to back it up) think that for new sites, that aren't ranked and don't yet have any real "competition", that building spammy links is a negative - theoretically, since nobody yet "knows" or is "competing" with your site, having a large number spammy of links appear could be considered a negative.

Click to expand...

Yea, I totally agree. I think I shot myself in the foot by doing a big LFE campaign as soon as the site was launched. Google has indexed some of the LFE pages, and is even showing some of the backlinks in the Webmaster Tools. Maybe Google still "trusts" those WPMU hosts? Do you think I should go ahead and delete all the LFE blog posts? I appreciate any advice you can give me, thanks!

u can own urself with any tool if u use it wrong
lfe works good to me

It also depends on how you linked on WPMU hosts.

Did you used unique or spinned or duplicate content?
Did you also linked with blogroll or only with blogroll?
Do blogs have 1 page or a lot of content?

What abotu other sites you used LFE with? Do they rank well?

If your website does not rank, and it has no sigificant backlinks, I would probably start with the new domain, with the same content and deleted old domain.

Yea, I totally agree. I think I shot myself in the foot by doing a big LFE campaign as soon as the site was launched. Google has indexed some of the LFE pages, and is even showing some of the backlinks in the Webmaster Tools. Maybe Google still "trusts" those WPMU hosts? Do you think I should go ahead and delete all the LFE blog posts? I appreciate any advice you can give me, thanks!

Click to expand...

Wish I could help.

All I know is that by reducing spammy links off the cuff I reduce my chances of ending up in sandbox hell. (I still get there a good part of the time).

Personally, I just wait it out and have enough projects on the go so that even though some of them are sandboxed at any given time, some of them aren't.

seojumper said:

It also depends on how you linked on WPMU hosts.

Did you used unique or spinned or duplicate content?
Did you also linked with blogroll or only with blogroll?
Do blogs have 1 page or a lot of content?

What abotu other sites you used LFE with? Do they rank well?

If your website does not rank, and it has no sigificant backlinks, I would probably start with the new domain, with the same content and deleted old domain.

Click to expand...

I used significantly spun content and only used in-text links and spun anchor text. Most of the blogs are only 1 or 2 posts.

I haven't used LFE on any other sites. The domain does have some good backlinks. It will come back in the SERPS for like 2 days and rank #1 or #2 for my keywords, and then disappear for like 4 weeks. Its done this 4 times already......

I'm really considering deleting all of my LFE blogs before submitting another reconsideration request. Any advice either way??

I haven't used LFE on any other sites. The domain does have some good backlinks. It will come back in the SERPS for like 2 days and rank #1 or #2 for my keywords, and then disappear for like 4 weeks. Its done this 4 times already......

Click to expand...

Nah I wouldn't. I had a site just like this that I didn't use LFE on and in fact was very very white hat. it bounced like this for 7 - 8 months (no joke) until settling at 4 and 5 (depending on the mood of Google). Don't worry keep building.

They have robots that have some sort of AI to check for spam links, try to make them look as unique as possible; also do not build millions of links to a new website, give it a little time.

Fwiffo said:

Common "internet theory" (and this has been mentioned by google many times before) is that "external links can not cause a minus to a website"

Logic often quoted is that if they did, it would be too easy for people to blast a competitor's site right out of the SERPs.

Most of the issues quoted on the document are about factors where you're linking out - ie putting links to crappy sites somewhere. (since google knows that only you (or a hacker) could have put these there, it's better able to judge.

That being said, I personally (and this is just my opinion, no data to back it up) think that for new sites, that aren't ranked and don't yet have any real "competition", that building spammy links is a negative - theoretically, since nobody yet "knows" or is "competing" with your site, having a large number spammy of links appear could be considered a negative.

Click to expand...

This isn't entirely true though... google bombing and concentrated link spamming can still have a negative impact on a site, ranging from loss of TrustRank, to outright de-indexing.

It's set up so that most of the time you just get sandboxed, but it is indeed possible to hurt yourself bad with crappy link building tactics.