A WebmasterWorld thread started by old-timer SEO, goodROI, posted that as a side project, he took an old site of his that was not doing much and decided to see if he can poison it in Google with spammy links. He said after ten weeks of trying, he saw no negative impact on its ranking in Google.
Greg said:
We grabbed a bunch of the spammiest expired domains and repurposed some dead domains from previous experiments. Then we pointed all of them to this old site (some 301 redirects & some run of site spammy links). We autogenerated thousands of pages to suffocate googlebot with spammy content filled with poison links. Googlebot loves crawling that infinite source of spam!
No change in the old site's ranking he said, "It's been over 10 weeks and that small old site is still holding steady despite exponentially boosting its backlink profile with spammy stuff."
He said this is a single test of trying to see if negative SEO does exist but in this one example, so far, the site is holding up.
Have you ever been able to hurt a site with spammy links? Take my anonymous poll below:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
