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.
