Pink-Hat SEO?

[Zagor]

OK, all jokes aside, what's the worst thing you can do to get the quickest eyebrow raise from Google? Although, overkill with any technique, even with white hat ones, can be fatal, but a friend of mine said the Bookmarking Demon was the tool that destroyed a few of his sites.

 

[Silk]

I'm going to have to say, offer malware or viruses for download. Yeah, that isn't exactly something someone is going to do, but it definitely would be the worst!

 

[handsonhosting]

The worst whitehat is getting too many links too quickly!

Hands-on experienced this last year when Artashes (the man who runs this forum) graciously posted a link on his other forum that we host (talkfreelance.com) and within 2 days we had 174,000 inbound links to our site which threw up a red flag to Google and ended up getting our site sandboxed.

With a little scrambling, the link on the talkfreelance.com site was changed to a NO FOLLOW link and within 4 or 5 days our rankings appeared back in Google again.

It's one thing to receive links from various places, but when you receive 174,000 (maybe more), it was enough to cause Google to take notice.

We see the same with WhiteHat SEO that we do for other websites too - Too many inbound links too quickly can get you de-listed (or at least penalized).

 

[Artashes]

and within 2 days we had 174,000 inbound links to our site which threw up a red flag to Google and ended up getting our site sandboxed.

True, but I am curious whether Google counts that as actual 174,000 unique links as they are all pointing from a single URL? Certainly 174,000 different sites within different IP blocks pointing at a site is just a tad different than 1 site with 500,000 pages pointing to that same site... not sure if that makes sense.

 

[handsonhosting]

I would have assumed the same, that google would have treated it as "X" links from a single site, but since it was from multiple pages within a site (all forum posts with the same footer) google tagged it as 174,000 individual links.

Even today, google webmaster tools states that there's 182,298 links from talkfreelance and 36,619 from hostingdiscussion and 12,360 from webhostingtalk

Kinda crazy.

 

[sherwood]

I agree with you about getting too many backlinks too quickly. Do you think it also applies to signature links? Suppose I had 50,000 posts in a forum. If I added a link to my new website in my signature, the website would get 50,000 inbound links in no time, right? Would it be frowned upon by Google?

 

[Zagor]

The worst whitehat is getting too many links too quickly!

Hands-on experienced this last year when Artashes (the man who runs this forum) graciously posted a link on his other forum that we host (talkfreelance.com) and within 2 days we had 174,000 inbound links to our site which threw up a red flag to Google and ended up getting our site sandboxed.

With a little scrambling, the link on the talkfreelance.com site was changed to a NO FOLLOW link and within 4 or 5 days our rankings appeared back in Google again.

It's one thing to receive links from various places, but when you receive 174,000 (maybe more), it was enough to cause Google to take notice.

We see the same with WhiteHat SEO that we do for other websites too - Too many inbound links too quickly can get you de-listed (or at least penalized).

Well, from my experience I never had any problems when linking to my sites from my large (huge page number) sites. On the other hand I don't own sites with such many pages like HD and TF so I can't say for sure.

I agree with you about getting too many backlinks too quickly. Do you think it also applies to signature links? Suppose I had 50,000 posts in a forum. If I added a link to my new website in my signature, the website would get 50,000 inbound links in no time, right? Would it be frowned upon by Google?

Link is a link, no matter where it is on the page (though higher it is on the page higher is its value - at least from my calculations).

 

[ez2hosting]

the problem is not the number of links you build but the quality of them, if you build 1k blog comments with PR links in a month and 1k directory submissions with no PR the next then Google is going to be fishy about your blog...

 

[HostMantis]

I agree with you about getting too many backlinks too quickly. Do you think it also applies to signature links? Suppose I had 50,000 posts in a forum. If I added a link to my new website in my signature, the website would get 50,000 inbound links in no time, right? Would it be frowned upon by Google?

This is a good question. I honestly think forum signature links don't really carry much weight as far as Google is concerned. Or at least as much as most people think they do.

 

[paullopez]

I agreed with HostMantis. Actually forum Signature links should be considered for only advertising purpose not for any optimization. In addition forum participation is not for a SEO concern. In my opinion getting back links and back links for a website or blog make no sense when those back links are not being able to generate targeted traffic.


Apart from the topic, search engines are not the only place to increase sales conversion rate of your business and therefore I was wondering why too many people are worried about SEO, when they can utilize the forums and other marketing strategies benefits in a good manner.

 

[HostColor]

A few years ago a developer I hired "killed" a very good website of mine because it made URL to have duplicate database queries.

 

[SimplyShared]

Worst would be link farming and malware. As handsonhosting getting over say 500 links in a day or so will without doubt raise some flags, but getting 174,000... They'll really be scratching their heads!

 

[pinellashosting]

The worst whitehat is getting too many links too quickly!

Hands-on experienced this last year when Artashes (the man who runs this forum) graciously posted a link on his other forum that we host (talkfreelance.com) and within 2 days we had 174,000 inbound links to our site which threw up a red flag to Google and ended up getting our site sandboxed.

With a little scrambling, the link on the talkfreelance.com site was changed to a NO FOLLOW link and within 4 or 5 days our rankings appeared back in Google again.

It's one thing to receive links from various places, but when you receive 174,000 (maybe more), it was enough to cause Google to take notice.

We see the same with WhiteHat SEO that we do for other websites too - Too many inbound links too quickly can get you de-listed (or at least penalized).

Wow 174,000 links that is crazy. I had no idea how they would handle this. Thanks for the information..