The Battle Between Good and Evil! (Link-Wise)

Many people throughout the SEO world will readily agree that link building is easily the most important facet of SEO.  Since 1997 when Google first began to institute the incorporation of inbound links  to represent ‘references’, SEOs have been working to unravel all of the aspects of this impressive initiative.  After 14 years this issue has been dissected, improved, re-dissected and morphed once again, as is the case with most major algorithm alterations.  As it stands now there exists a school of thought that can roundly agree on major principles of Links and the Page Rank they seem to be ordered by.  One of the last questions out there is can ‘Bad Links’ (that is Links from Blacklisted sites or sites with spam ratings) be detrimental to a website.

The short answer here is yes.  If you take part in terrible spam link sites, ridiculous amounts of reciprocal link trades, paid links and the like, you will certainly see a hit to your rankings.  However, this exercise in logic invariably delivers the thinker to a seemingly existential paradigm.  That is, if bad links hurt sites, why not adopt the much easier strategy of creating horrible blacklisted sites and from there send armadas or terrible inbound links to your competitors, leaving an easy road to the top of the SERPs and untold piles of gold! Well, aside from the obvious “eye for an eye leaves everyone blind” scenario this creates, the short answer here is no.

“But Tom! In your first paragraph you said a bad link will hurt you! But in your second paragraph, you say that strategy wouldn’t work? What gives, huh!?”  Well friend, at first glance it would have appeared you caught me, hoisted by my own petard! But nay, this is not the case.  The most indisputable evidence I can offer is that this tactic doesn’t appear to be used in any capacity by the black hat community.  If it worked it would likely be common knowledge and used indiscriminately to debase good sites.  However, for the sake of argument let’s say you’re the type of SEOs who can’t let Google be responsible to safeguard you against all sorts of bumps in the middle of the night.  Well you too can relax now that Google has created a place for you to yell from the mountaintop that this link or that link was not your doing.  By taking spam links, or links you don’t want away from the equation Google is again giving more power (and onus) to the Webmaster to make this happen.  It’s most likely a good exercise, but not one worth using a lot of time on.  Your main concern should still be link building, and not perusing your Webmaster Tools to ensure that you’re not being spammed.  In fact, the easiest way to go about this is monitor your Google Feed (which you should be doing anyways) and whenever you see something suspicious en mass that’s a pretty good indication this may have happened to you and you can quickly resolve the situation.

Hope it was helpful folks, I am a blogger AMA.