Link Building Archives

A High Rankings Forum member talks about how he has a variety of sites that are all networked on the same server with the same owner. They're not related topically, but there are some subpages where adding links may be of value to search engines and visitors. Would it be bad to link to pages in the same link network? Are there any risks?

It depends, actually. If you're trying to hide the relationship between sites, as one says, it's deceptive and could be dangerous. On the other hand, if you're being open about the relationship and linking where appropriate, it should be fine.

Another option is to add "our link network" to the footer of the site to bring other people to your other pages. It's not as topical, but it may drive traffic. However, that may not necessarily be the kind of traffic or links you're aiming for, so that is totally up to you.

The forum discussion that ensues is informative, so take a read at High Rankings Forum.

A WebmasterWorld member wants confirmation if getting multiple links would cause a penalty in the SERPs. He notes that very popular sites which rank on the first page of Google have a lot of links, including those from "shady" places. Why, then, can't he do the same thing on his smaller site?

Some forum members believe that the age and authority of site matter in this case. Some sites just always get inbound links. Others don't unless something is up.

A new site that gets like 20 links per day, then all of a sudden gets 2000 in one day, well then there's tom foolery going on there and the penalty gets slapped. Once that penalty is slapped, over time it will go away.

So be careful when you build your links, because you can find a dent in your rankings, but as forum members note, the rankings will generally improve.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has a long discussion on how Google defines what a link farm is or is not. I have decided to isolate a Googler's comment, because who can best define what Google feels a link farm is, better then a Google employee?

JohnMu, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, posted twice in the thread. The second time he offered additional advice on how he would define a link farm. He said:

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself "would I be doing this (linking there) if search engines didn't exist?"

Another way of looking at it is to think about where and how you will be linking: Do you feel fine with linking to that site with a highlighted link in your main content or would you rather have the link in 5pt gray on white in the footer? Do you want your visitors to see and use it or is it just for the search engines?

John also links to the Google link schemes page which has the official line on bad linking. Now, of course there is gray area and that is where John's post above comes into play. Even with that, people still may be confused. Well, if it feels wrong - then it might be.

John admits, even him being a Googler, it is still "hard for [him] to provide a definition of what Google sees as that."

If you need more clarification or have specific questions, you can join the Google Groups thread and hopefully be aided in the right direction.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

As the link building strategy becomes more and more difficult (at least by some), people are seeking out alternatives to the standard two-way linking practice. In a WebmasterWorld thread, a member is looking at a triangular link strategy which wouldn't be directly reciprocal but he's hoping that he'll still benefit.

Would you do it? If you're looking for reciprocal links, three-way linking isn't much better. Furthermore, if the goal is to outwit Google, Google knows (a lot).

Ask yourself why you're even engaging in 3-way linking. Is it to help you or is it to help your audience? Again, you need to consider what your users want first.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A newish term, named SEOicide, caught my attention via a WebmasterWorld thread. The thread discusses how an SEO has the opportunity to buy 70,000 links from a PR7 site for a great price. He asks if it he should do it.

Most everyone says, don't - you are setting yourself up for a penalty. In fact, words like SEOicide are being used to describe what you would do to yourself. But others are not convinced, they say, if the site will drive traffic to your site, then do it.

I would buy, if the direct traffic from those links brings you a profit. Otherwise it sounds very questionable a I would not sign any long term agreement/contract.

Anyway, back to the term SEOicide. I did some searching and it appears the Jane Copland of SEOmoz used the term on February 21st of this year in a comment on a blog post. So WebmasterWorld was not the first place it was used in writing.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Over at WebmasterWorld, users are discussing the potential value of a link from social bookmarking site StumbleUpon. Is it worth trying to submit to or is it completely not worth the effort?

Well, it depends on the content. Is it "worthy of being stumbled?" That's something that you must seek out. Of course, if you choose to take the plunge, the right person might come along and StumbleUpon your page and then blog about it, which can be an incredibly valuable link building experience.

Just a word of caution though: don't use social networks to be overly self-promotional. As one person mentioned in the thread, he was banned for submitting his own content. As a heavy StumbleUpon user myself, there's absolutely nothing wrong with submitting your own content but you must be sure to avoid being self-promotional. In other words, don't only submit your own stuff; mix it with other content as well.

[Note: StumbleUpon links are nofollowed, so from a search engine perspective, it doesn't help much.]

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Googler, JohnMu, has some basic linking advice in a Google Groups thread. In short, John explains that logic behind who you should or should not link to. I'll quote John:

In general, if you can provide relevant links for users of your site, feel free to link to them. That's how the web works :-), even if those links partially come from sites that you also own or work on.

That said, if those links are not relevant to the site, it's generally safe to say that they will not provide any significant value to your users, even if the sites you're linking to happen to be owned, made or run by the same owner. If you own or have made a group of fairly unrelated sites, it might be best to keep them on a portfolio page.

In general, thinking about where and how you would link to these sites will provide a good guideline. Would you want to keep this link visible in your main content? Or would you prefer to keep it in 5pt light-grey on white text on the bottom of your pages?

Did we learn anything new from this? Not most of you, but for our new readers or those searching for "advice on linking out," this article may come in handy.

If you have more questions, join the thread at Google Groups.

Note: This article was written last week and scheduled to be published automatically on Monday, April 21st.

A High Rankings Forum thread is a perfect example of how people can misinterpret SEO terms. In this particular case, because a site has lost its rankings, an individual is looking to build a "link farm."

Well, sort of. A "link farm," he says, is how he builds reciprocal yet relevant links. (A real "link farm" is frowned upon by Google.)

If you ask me, that doesn't sound like a link farm. But there's a problem within this industry that can cause serious penalties (without any idea why) if you're not understanding the proper SEO terms.

My guess is that in this particular member's case, he lost rankings because his boss misinterpreted another SEO tactic yet again. It's very important to understand these terms clearly. If in doubt, ask a forum member for help.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Some link builders spend a significant time just trying to build up some sort of rapport with other webmasters. Eventually, they may feel that the pool is drying out. With so many link requests nowadays, you can't blame but feel helpless since everyone seems to be getting numerous link swap requests daily.

Where else can you go to build those valuable links? Perhaps your scope is too narrow. There are millions of sites on the internet, so look at related sites, local sites, un-related industries that still have some sort of relationship to the topic, how-to sites, blogs, history sites, and more. There really should be no shortage.

And truthfully, if you're feeling limited, perhaps you're also looking for "high authority" sites. Look into sites that may not be as authoritative but still show some promise.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

I was doing my forum research this morning and I spotted a HighRankings Forum thread with the title "Link Unbuilding." I love it! The new link building, for some, is link unbuilding!

Here is the SEO's concern and this concern is pretty common in the SEO circles:

Over the past few days Google has been reporting a phenomenal increase in the number of links to my index page. While there are a few genunine new links, the majority come from a single site - in Japanese and hosted in Japan which seems to be causing Google to believe that it has over a 1000 new links to my site every day.

The site seems genunine enough so I am assuming that this is the result of a glitch whatever forum management software they are using. Given that I cannot translate the site using Google the option of politely writing and asking them to stop is out of the question. I assume that Google is smart enough but I am wondering if it could penalize me for flooding it with spurious external links in this way although I have no control over what is going on. Any ideas?

I find it funny that this is a concern - because as Google has said in the past, most of the time, you cannot control who links to you. It is only an issue when your linkage patterns look to be very very spammy and unnatural. But this doesn't stop a concern that is spreading through our space - that links can and do harm your site. It has happened and is becoming more and more of an issue very day.

Confusion is probably the biggest issue, as we demonstrated in this poll. In fact, one of the most requested new features SEOs want in Google Webmaster Tools is a way to label links that they don't want. Will it happen - I would bet on it, before the end of this year.

In any event, a thread like this is now not uncommon these days and expect to see a lot more of them.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Face it. Sometimes you can exchange links for free, and other times, you just have to buy a link. But is there a minimum toolbar PageRank number that you should go by before buying that link?

Obviously, this isn't a black and white question. Consider the content of the site. Two of the key questions you should ask yourself are "Is it relevant?" and "Can it deliver traffic?"

But beyond that, there's more that can be had if you consider buying that link now. A site that is PR0 can go nowhere but up. If you believe the site has potential, buy the link now and then just wait until the PageRank increases. You'll benefit from getting the early start.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

On February 20th, I asked our readers if they thought a listing in the Open Directory Project would have a major impact on a site's Google ranking. The response was split down the middle.

We only had 58 responses, which is very low for a typical Search Engine Roundtable poll, but the results were really down the middle.

As you can see, 47% said that a link from ODP does not have a major impact on your Google rankings. While 45% said a link from ODP will have a major impact on your Google rankings. Of course, the question is not clear cut and there can be "it depends," answers.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Should you save wads of cash to buy link building software that contacts hundreds (or thousands) of webmasters for you to give you some links? Wiep Knol says no. In his recent blog post, he explains why link building software isn't the way to go and gives nine reasons why.

The biggest reason, at least from what I encounter on my day to day emails, is that link building requests like these are far from personal. Wiep also provides other reasons: it's bad for your image, it's easy to copy, it results in an unnatural link profile, and you'll miss the links you want, among others.

It takes considerable effort to build quality links. Buying a $200 piece of software won't do it for you. Research, commitment, and time investment are critical. Software won't give you the results of hard labor. It takes time and energy to make it to the top.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member has been applying regular search engine optimization and link building techniques and is noticing that the traffic hasn't improved as substantially in the latter months of the campaign as it did initially. Is this something normal?

Actually, in many ways, it is. The first few months are typically a lot easier than the later months. Tedster mentions that sometimes it takes links time to reach their full power and cites Google's "Historical and Age Data" patent.

There's no reason to give up, though. It's time to focus your energy on building links from high quality relevant sites. Focus your energy on building good content to attract such links.

Forum members also believe that it may not necessarily be link building that can be holding you back. It could be that your competition is ahead of its game. One suspects that it may even be the work of a human editor. What you can do, though, is take the recommendations and be aggressive in your link building efforts. Then see if you move up.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In Search Engine Land's weekly column about link building, Eric Ward tackles a question about link building best practices. Is there such a thing?

Guess what? The answer is no.

He explains:

The problem with link building best practices is that if you ask ten link builders to agree on a set of best practices, each of them will be right, and each of them will be wrong, myself included.

What works for one link builder may not work for another link builder and vice versa. There's just no "standard" for link building. It comes down to the site's goals -- if they're looking to monetize, if they're looking for traffic, if they're looking for conversions, etc.

But since folks at Sphinn were looking for more, Eric has started a new column on his blog called Link Building Best Practices.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Adam Audette wrote a brilliant piece on the fundamentals of link building on his blog, and he's right on the money. His core message is that links reflect value, so your linking strategy should focus on finding that valuable link and seeking out the appropriate neighborhoods for gathering such links. The higher the quality of the link, the better it is for you.

I'd summarize the entire post, but it really deserves its own read, your social media bookmarking, and your links too. Seriously. Adam did a great job. He divides his post into how link building has evolved, the components of a quality link, the importance of link neighborhoods, where to begin, and how to perform strategic link building.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member asks how to find local directories for link building purposes.

One member suggests that you search with "directory + [your local area]" on Google or Yahoo to find some really targeted local directories.

There are also some great paid directories including Best of the Web's regional directory and Yahoo's regional directory, both of which are subscription-based models.

How do you find quality link directories?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A month ago I wrote, Google's Matt Cutts Replies to -60 Penalty Thread at Google where I summarize how Matt said some links are hurting a particular site.

At that point, I decided to poll our readers and see if they feel that most of the "minus" X related threads and penalties are back link related or something else. Most believe the penalties are related to one's back links.

Here is the break down:

• 47% said Yes (50 responses)
• 28% said No Idea (30 responses)
• 25% said No (26 responses)

My personal feeling is that many of those perceived penalties have to do with the links to the site. Just a hunch.

Forum discussion continued at Google Groups.

Anyone who knows the Google Web Spam team well, knows that they all have a huge distaste for link manipulation. In my opinion, it is more than just a distance for some of the web spam team members, specifically Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts, a great guy, Google engineer since January 2000, has a strong, deep, gut wrenching distaste for link manipulation, in my opinion. Where do I get this opinion from? I don't think from our conversations but from watching Matt write and communicate with webmasters on link issues since early 2003.

Let me pull out one recent post by Matt Cutts that demonstrates it. A Sphinn thread, Matt writes:

Todd, what about a query like [symptoms of a heart attack]? The searcher wants accurate results ASAP, and might not have enough time or patience to research the subject thoroughly. We think about searches like this and issues like this all the time, which is why Google may come across as humorless when we talk about some linking issues.

I thought Eric made a pretty compelling argument. When you search, you don't want a search engine that is "fooled" by lower-quality links. And if you're trying to compete for search rankings fairly, you don't want a site that takes short cuts to do better than your site. That's why it's so helpful to have great content first and foremost and then promote that content well as opposed to just building links to low-quality content.

Just read that. Do people search for such things? I would think so. I don't think heart attacks are sudden always and I hear many people get them without knowing, they just feel discomfort. So Matt takes this stuff beyond seriously, but sometimes, I feel, personally. Imagine, spending eight plus years working at a company to build out a search experience that provides as much help to the searcher as possible. Now, imagine you have people come in and try to manipulate that? In my opinion, it would take a strong man to not take that somewhat personally. Of course, Googlers can't take it personally, but in some cases - it can be hard not to.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A DigitalPoint Forums has reports from dozens of webmasters that their link counts in the tool are way down.

Some users are reporting as much as of an 80-percent reduction in the number of links Yahoo Site Explorer is finding for their sites.

Lost about 75% on all sites today.

Ya! This was a huge drop though..not the usual slight fluctuation. i lost like 12k links.

I don't track my links on a frequent basis for this site, but I was able to dig up a past link count that I posted here back in October 2007 where I found I had 216,880 inlinks reported. Today, Yahoo Site Explorer reports I have 271,196 inlinks. So I don't see any reductions and I also checked some tools that might have been tracking this for me on an automated basis and I see no reduction.

(1) Either this site was not impacted or
(2) This was a temporary bug that is now fixed.

Are your Yahoo inlinks report down drastically?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

SEOmoz posted results from a study he did where he concluded that only the first anchor text on a page is counted by Google as the anchor text for that link.

For example, let's say you have a two links to the same URL on the same page. The first link on that page uses the anchor text [Big Blue Pineapple Chair] but the second anchor text uses [Small Red Cantaloupe Chair]. Which one will Google count as the true anchor text to be associated to that page? According to Rand's study, it is the first, i.e. [Big Blue Pineapple Chair] and not the [Small Red Cantaloupe Chair].

The Sphinn thread on the topic actually says this study was first conducted by the SmackDown blog (here is the Sphinn thread for that post). Smackdown explains that you may want to rethink linking your logo to your home page if this is the case. I am not sure about that, unless you use some weird code that interprets the image tag as an anchor tag.

It makes sense why Google or any other search engine might pick the first use of anchor text for a page on the page. I personally did not validate the studies but it is important to point out, nevertheless.

There is also a debate about nofollowing those links and what type of impact that may have on those links.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

The Google Webmaster Tools "external links" report is buggy over the weekend. The tool is not showing any backlinks anymore for, I believe, any site.

For example, here are the non-existent backlinks for the Search Engine Roundtable:

There are dozens of reports from webmasters worrying if Google banned them or not. Threads at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups both have concerned webmasters discussion the issue.

The issue started Sunday morning or early afternoon and is still an issue at the time I write this. Hopefully it will be fixed shortly.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

Now Fixed: At about 3pm (EST), it has now been fixed. JohnMu, a Google Webmaster Trends Analysts posted below and I confirmed it is now fixed.

Ann Smarty poses an interesting question on Search Engine Journal. As blogs are communities, it's useful to comment and leave your thoughts. But what if you add your link to the comment? Is it spam?

There are numerous tools that can check to see whether the comment is spammy and it depends on your blog installation (MovableType versus WordPress versus any other platform). But Annie notices that search engines are smart enough to factor in whether the comments are spam and also check for relevancy, comment content length, similar content on other blogs, blacklist terms, and other elements to determine whether it's spam or not. She concludes that if you add relevancy and ensure that you don't violate these rules, you're not spamming at all and you're adding value instead.

In the Sphinn forum discussion, bloggers acknowledge that it's important to put all comments through moderation (if you care about your blog). Apparently, some people actually do rank well after spamming blogs with their comments. If your blog is your baby, don't let those comments through.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Three recent link building articles have appeared on Sphinn that are worthwhile for link builders. I'll walk through each of them and explain why they are important.

In Squeezing the [Link] Juice out of Low Hanging Fruit, Bob Massa talks about how hard work pays off. He emphasizes many points but stresses that you should carefully select quality directories to submit to and submit properly. This way, you don't have to pay for links.

Matt Cutts wrote a post with SEO advice on links in 2005 and published it on the 11th. He suggests that you should become a resource, provide an ongoing service, be valuable, and keep your product open. Quality content breeds links naturally. If you think about it, has much really changed?

Another post is Loren Baker's explosive organic and paid link building tips. In this post, Loren says that you should aim for relevancy, selective anchor text, and says that you should not be concerned about nofollow. Sometimes, he acknowledges that you may have to pay for those links and you may want to take advantage of new sites to build your links on. It doesn't hurt and they will eventually age.

Do you have anything to add? Forum discussion continues at Sphinn (Bob Massa), Sphinn (Matt Cutts), and Sphinn (Loren Baker).

When a webmaster was looking at his site data in Google Webmaster Tools, he noticed that one of the "Pages with external links" was linking to his IP address and not his site. He's pretty baffled about why that would be the case. He has no way of reconciling this as far as he's investigated, and it looks like it may not even be possible from what Tedster says.

This kind of thing can happen when some inept webmaster links to you using your ip address - I once had this happen with a link from a major newspaper! Ionly discovered the source through the server log referers - not through a link report from any search engine. Apparently Webmaster Tools got this crossed up in your case, however it happened that they found the ip address.

That sucks. A lot. It especially sucks if they decide to use your IP address when you're on shared hosting and the link never shows up to the reader. It's a poor user experience all around and nobody really benefits. Please consider to use a real URL and not an IP when you link to people. Thank you on behalf of all competent webmasters and users.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The results are in, and SEOs voted on which link they would prefer.

65% of SEOs said they would prefer an old and aged link over a fresh and new link. 35% said they want the newer fresh links over the older links.

We polled our readers back in late January and with 113 responses today, I think the verdict is in. At least we have a overwhelming majority opting one way as opposed to being undecided.

Our last poll results showed SEO's cant agree on the value of an image link, but I think, for the most part, SEOs can agree on this question.

Continued forum discussion at SitePoint Forums.

I honestly wanted to avoid this topic, but due to the amount of attention on this topic right now, it is our duty to let the non-forum activists know about the controversy.

Shari Thurow authored an article on Search Engine Land named You'd Be Wise To "NoFollow" This Dubious SEO Advice. In short, Shari said worry more about your site architecture then using the nofollow attribute to funnel your PageRank, sculpt your PageRank, or silo your site for search engines. Shari is of the opinion that a quality site does not have to worry about it, while others, including Stephan Spencer's Search Engine Land article named Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact says it works.

Honestly, there is no doubt in my mind that using the nofollow attribute or even JavaScript or a robots.txt file to manage your PageRank and link popularity flow works. It is nothing new and has been done for ages, just not with the nofollow, since the nofollow is relatively new. Do I do it? No. Why? Cause I focus more on other things, which I think is Shari's point. Would I benefit from doing it? Probably.

Michael Gray's Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Sculpting Your Pagerank takes issue with picking on those who do sculpt PageRank. He says there is nothing wrong with it at a macro level. It all depends in my opinion.

At SMX West a buddy showed me his site and asked me what more he can do. This site was absolutely optimized to the T. Pages that didn't have much content were nofollowed via the link and noindexed on the page level. The detail he put into his site was truly amazing. It all depends on priorities and resources. I say, if you got the time, why not sculpt. Google is not handing out penalties to those who use the nofollow and in the Linking Q&A panel, Matt Cutts was asked:

Q: PageRank sculpting/siloing: should we do that? Matt: In general, worry more about the high quality of your site. After you've taken care of it, then think about sculpting. Put your best pages on top - your best selling products should be linked from your homepage. The nofollow and metatags essentially do the same kind of thing. Google is against abusive manipulation.

So why not, if you have exhausted everything else you could have done on your site.

In any event, the discussion is incredibly heated at Sphinn, so enjoy.

Pole Position Marketing did an excellent writeup on some link building secrets from 12 link building type people, including Rand Fishkin, Hamlet Batista, Jim Boykin, Debra Mastaler, Bob Gladstein, and Michael Gray and published the findings in a 24 page PDF.

Here's part of one tip (you'll have to read the PDF to get the rest of the tips):

Not all links are created equal. We know that some links help more than others in getting high search engine rankings. For some time now, link builders have primarily relied on Google’s toolbar PageRank as a good measure of the quality of a link. Higher PageRank values were ostensibly better than lower ones. Unfortunately, Google has played so much with the PageRank values it displays that it has become increasingly less useful.

Forum members are finding this information incredibly useful and actionable, so take a read.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread touches on a simple topic, the topic of link pages. Many sites have them, a page that contains links to link partners. Some of these pages are labeled "resources," some are labelled "partners," some are "directory," and some even "links."

The characteristics of the page look a lot like the ones you find for a search on resources page in Google. They have tons of links on them, sometimes they are organized by category, sometimes alphabetically and sometimes not organized at all.

It is the location most old school link exchangers use to place links back to those they exchange links with.

Why might these pages not work?

I like how WebmasterWorld moderator, minnapple, put it, so I will quote:

The main problem with link pages is that everyone links out of them, but no one links to them.

Many "links" pages are not even included in google's indexed because of lack of internal link support of the main site.

And if they are included, they don't look natural. What page links out to a hundred different places and doesn't have a similar count of links coming in? These pages.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld member is in a bit of trouble because he feels that there are no relevant sites for his ecommerce shop. Obviously, since search engines like relevant links, this is a bit of a challenge for those who can't possibly have relevant sites.

There are numerous reactions to this comment. First of all, the WWW is so vast that it's hardly believable that there are no relevant sites. And if there aren't, it's probably not a very competitive area either, is it?

One forum member adds that link profile is more important than the context of the sites linking to you. Another advises to widen the scope of links you're looking for.

Many are too nervous to get links from irrelevant sites. They believe that it substantially helps their rankings.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Mid January I asked An image link is worth what percentage less than a text link? The question was probably not clear enough and I honestly don't blame the respondents. It is a hard question to answer, because there are so many variables that can impact such an answer.

But I thought I share with you the 171 responses to-date:

All over the board as you can tell. Here is the detailed breakdown:

• 24 respondents (14%) said an image link is "100% - Equal to Text Link"
• 8 respondents (5%) said an image link is "90% the value of a text link"
• 16 respondents (9%) said an image link is "80% the value of a text link"
• 25 respondents (15%) said an image link is "70% the value of a text link"
• 16 respondents (9%) said an image link is "60% the value of a text link"
• 33 respondents (19%) said an image link is "50% the value of a text link"
• 19 respondents (11%) said an image link is "40% the value of a text link"
• 10 respondents(6%) said an image link is "30% the value of a text link"
• 9 respondents (5%) said an image link is "20% the value of a text link"
• 5 respondents (3%) said an image link is "10% the value of a text link"
• 6 respondents (4%) said an image link is worth "0% the value of a text link"

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

We reported several days ago that Google hasn't updated their external link counts and data in Google Webmaster Tools since early January. Webmasters and SEOs began to complain so Googlers began looking into it.

We now have reports via Google Groups that webmasters are seeing an update to their link counts in Webmaster Tools.

I would share our most popular pages according to Google but in early February Google removed the download table option and we now just have "download all external links." Of course, I can get to this data but I am at SMX and have limited time to mess around in Excel right now.

It would save me a lot of time and I am sure other SEOs and Webmasters a lot of time if Google put that option back.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Taking you back to the -60 thread I blogged about earlier. The thread is at Google Groups and it shows us a little of something that may be obvious but should be spoken about.

Once you are penalized in Google or probably any other search engine for that matter, it is extremely hard to get back in. While you may be able to get away with bad links linking to your site before getting penalized, but once your site is penalized those bad links can keep you out of the index. So yes, bad links can hurt your site - even if there are just a few.

John Web aka JLH Design has an interesting post in that thread that expresses this concern. Let me quote you the part of his post that talks about this and you can read in its entirety over here.

I'm hoping that this doesn't cause a storm of people now worried about some shady seo linking to them in a spammy way to hurt their rankings. From what I gather from this thread is that once a site has been flagged and penalized that all of the details including on site and off site factors get looked at very closely, much closer than before. Remember that Google has a copy of every page on the web that they've crawled and can quickly pull up any relationships between them. So if on 10/16/07 thirty seven links start appearing with the anchor text "Dining Room Furniture" to a product page on sites that don't monitor their commenter's links, they'll be able to notice it. On it's own this may be ignored as it is generally accepted that external sites cannot hurt your ranking (though that has been removed from Googles documentation) but when coupled with other signals it may add up to something. I would imagine that it also has to be weighed as fraction of the whole of the links. In other words, if a site has 36,000 links to it and 34,000 links are from theme sponsorships, 1,000 are from keyword rich blog comments, 500 are from web directories, and only 10 are from actual sites giving out an editorial link that would be a pretty good sign that someone was trying to improve their ranking by external methods. If 99% of the links are questionable, then it may give them cause to not only devalue them but devalue the site as a whole as well. It's like the interlinking of commonly owned sites problem, or domain farming as its often called. For legitimate sites like Google, youtube, and blogger, some interlinking is possible, but only because if you look at the millions of links they have, only a very small percentage are from their own properites. Where it gets a site into trouble is when the majority of its links are from a common individual that a ranking penalty would make sense. I'm only guessing here and have absolutely no inside knowledge, just trying to talk it out.

All this is derived from Google reps continually insisting that this one site that is penalized remove all the bad links pointing to his site. Once you have bad links and your site is penalized, will Google use those links against you until they are all cleaned up or can you get back in?

What happened to the feeling that bad links can't hurt you too bad? Is this fair? Can this be used to hurt your competitors?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread on the -60 penalty at Google (there are so many of these now, -6, -10, -250, etc) now has several responses from Matt Cutts of Google.

Matt replies specifically to the nature of the posters site and not specifically to the nature of what a minus sixty penalty is. But the lack of not addressing the -60 specifically, can these minus whatever be associated with Matt's response to this user?

Matt tells the user that his backlinks look "unusual" and asks if he has been collecting links in an unusual manner. Here is Matt's post: