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Over at the Google Groups forum, yet another Googler said that bad links to your site cannot hurt you, at least for the most part.
Wysz, a Googler, said in response to someone being worried that a spammy site is linking to his site.
I wouldn't really worry about spam sites hurting your ranking by linking to you, as we understand that you can't (for the most part) control who links to your sites. However, there is some action you can take if you come across spam in Google's index. The preferred method of reporting spam to us is by clicking on "Report spam in our index" while logged into Webmaster Tools. If you don't have a Webmaster Tools account, you can use our non-authenticated spam report form: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
This is not the first time Google has spoken up about this. In Google's Adam Lasnik Speaks On What Links Can & Can't Hurt You we pretty much covered the same thing. I said there, "a link to a bad place "here and there" won't necessarily hurt you, but if "patterns" of bad links are seen, then you need to worry."
You may also want to read, Can Competitors Damage Google Rankings? by Chris Boggs and Can a Competitor Hurt Your Google Rankings? that I sourced from Google earlier.
Forum discussion at Google Groups.
Comments:
Chris Beasley
10/04/2007 12:39 am
I'm amazed I still see people worrying about this with all the times Google has reassured webmasters. Just last week I saw a rather heated discussion where some people were sure this was true.
Priyanka
10/04/2007 03:55 am
It would be a great relief on the part of website developers and SEO experts as it is difficult to control who links to their sites.As such, they take care to avoid such things but one can't be sure.
Claude Gelinas
10/04/2007 03:55 pm
As far as I can see, Google appears to be hunting down "patterns of spamming" way more than the occasional link popping up in a spammy "link farm" (or other spammy scheme).
Bart Gibby
03/21/2008 04:03 pm
The truth is that if you have enough cash you can control who links to you. Think about the Huge umbrella companies like time warner, disney, and so forth. These companies crank out tons of media all the time. They make movies, buy domains, and can afford hosting in any part of the world for almost indefinite amounts of time. If you dump enough cash into any keyword I bet you could eventually control huge amounts of traffic from search engines over all the domains that you owned. In fact I think we have all seen this happen. Some of us may even know people who have done this. Some of us might have even done this. It would be nice to have huge amounts of resources to dominate. All well maybe someday.
No Name
06/25/2009 01:42 am
Link spamming is still one of the best ways to rank well in Search Engine but this is definitely bad!
No Name
10/23/2009 11:49 am
I dont understand, what do they mean by spam links?