Can Bad Backlinks Hurt You?

Yes! Some people will tell you that this is a myth.  They are ignorant and underestimate the sophistication of search engines – especially Google.

Generally, bad backlinks will just give you no link juice.  What Google often does if it deems links to be manipulative or spammy is ignore them.  But, in some cases, they will actually penalize you.  Smaller and newer websites are more in danger of this penalty than big, established websites.

I had a client who, before meeting me, bought those 1,000 ′s of backlinks for $10 or something like that when he was first starting off.  It is not possible to make 1,000 high-quality backlinks for $10.  Therefore, this must have been an automated, spammy process that was the same for every client who purchased it.  Google is too smart for this tactic.

The result is that he cannot get his site out of the PR0 basement.  He has 7k+ links now – many of them high quality – and it still can’t get him above PR0.   He still ranks OK for some search terms that he’s targeting, but he should rank better.

How do you avoid getting penalized or having your links ignored?

By making sure you get high-quality manual backlinks.  You can do this yourself, but it is a very time-consuming and tedious process.  I actually recommend that you try doing some link-building yourself to understand the process.  When you consider how much your time is worth and how many quality backlinks can help your Google rankings and, therefore, your bottom line, I think you’ll realize that our packages are a good deal.

Make sure to vary your anchor text.  SEOs know that the anchor text in a link is used as a “vote” by the search engines for that search term. For example, if someone links to you with the text, “football,” then you’ll be a little bit better off for the search term “football.”  If you get enough of these votes, you will rise in the search engine rankings.  However, if all of your inbound links have the same anchor text, Google gets suspicious and may devalue those links or even penalize your site.  Most of your votes can be for “football,” but they can’t all be.

Our team is very good at varying the anchor text in such a way that is not suspicious, yet it helps you noticeably for your specific search terms. We’ve done it many times for many sites and our processes WORK.

What should you do if you’ve been penalized by Google?

You have three options:

Submit a consideration request to Google telling owning up to the bad things you did and hope they take you off of their naughty list.  These requests often take a very long time if they are answered at all.

Try to offset the penalty by getting enough high-quality links. This is very hard to do.

The best option is not a good option — start over on a new domain. I know it’s a lot of work, but it is the only guaranteed way to be given another chance. One Google executive even recommended this option.

What’s the bottom line of Bad Backlinks?

Low-quality, often automated backlinks do not help you and, in some cases, can actually hurt you.  Make sure you’re not wasting your time or money on bad backlinks.  You can probably do this yourself if you have a ton of extra time, but if you give us a chance to help you out, I think you’ll be happy with the results.