**by Eric Ward**
During a recent conference call, I made one of those bold statements
that was half for effect, and half in hopes of quieting an online
strategist that was also on the call. In my deepest voice, I
proclaimed:
In the same way the engines can evaluate the links pointing at your
site and rank you in the top ten, they can also evaluate the links
pointing at your site and determine you are link spamming and not rank
your site anywhere
I was challenged on that statement, but I stood by it.
The online strategist who challenged it said the engines couldn't and
shouldn't penalize a site since a site does not have 100% control over
who links to it. What if the link spamming was being done by a third
party as part of a link sabotage
<http://searchengineland.com/the-link-saboteurs-and-why-they-will-ultimately-fail-11694>
effort?
Anyone can join a link network without proving who they are or what
site they work for. Anyone can fire up social spam software and
pretend to be from a competitor site. What if someone less than
ethical owned a network of 500 weak content sites that collectively
contain 25,000 pages of content and then accepted a fee to insert
links to some other site on all 25,000 pages? No engine can divine
intent, thus no engine can fairly penalize for what looks like an
unnatural linking pattern
<http://searchengineland.com/spotting-unnatural-linking-patterns-12025>
.
Following this, I continued&
So if someone working for Nike.com pretends they are working for
Reebok.com (and are stupid) and execute a bunch of link spam tactics,
Reebok.com's rankings could be affected without Reebok having done
anything wrong. But not to Nike and Reebok. This could never happen to
a large brand site with hundreds of thousands of links because any
link spamming effort would be a mere drop in the ocean.
It could work on smaller niche sites, like one regional accounting
firm website against another regional accounting firm website, where
each site only has a few hundred links to begin with, and thus, a few
thousand new links from an obvious link network would be easier to
spot. And given this, isn't it unlikely any search engine could
penalize or lower a site's rank based on this, since there are
millions of small, niche sites and hundreds of millions of links to
account for?
Exactly. Maybe. No, not at all. It's not that simple.
My belief is that lowered rankings are wrongly interpreted as a
penalty when what's really happening is a devaluation of an inbound
link portfolio. I conduct link portfolio evaluation
<http://www.ericward.com/content-publicity-plan.html>
and improvement as part of my client work, and if you think back a
few years to when directory links were devalued, that's all you need
to understand the devaluation process. What once had value no longer
does. It's not a penalty, it's the process of an engine getting
smarter.
If 90% of your inbound link portfolio was low hanging link targets
anyone can get, you shouldn't be surprised
<http://searchengineland.com/new-years-resolution-know-your-inbound-link-potential-10255>
. The irony is that sites that suffer through a devaluation are
almost always the same sites that were overly dependent on non-merit
based link building tactics in the first place. Easy come, easy go.
The solution is pretty simple. Stop going after the easy stuff and go
get merit based links. Of course, that's easier said than done without
some help <http://bit.ly/TOwCY>
.
Back to the question at hand. Aside from devaluation, can an engine
evaluate the links pointing at your site and determine you are link
spamming and not rank your site anywhere?
I say yes.
Certain types of inbound link profiles could never happen without
active participation by the site's owners.
Help me out. Am I right, wrong, or somewhere in-between?
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Eric Ward <http://searchengineland.com/author/eric-ward/>
has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994,
providing services ranking from linking strategy
<http://www.ericward.com/linkstrategy.html>
to a monthly private newsletters on linking for subscribers.
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