Google Bowling? I Don't Think So

So WebPro News asks, are you paying attention to the practice of Google Bowling, where competitors sabotage your organic rankings by involving your website in unsavory SEO practices to get Google to penalize you? Sounds scary. The problem: That's nonsense.

Questionable inbound links generally do not carry any link value. But there's no evidence that Google penalizes a site for its inbound links. I don't believe they'd do that for precisely the reason the author gives: it's too easy (and too obvious) a way to game the engines and hurt your competitors.

The only reason Google will actively penalize you for the types of links coming into your site is if you are involved in a shady linking scheme. For example, a lot of spammers use triangle linking: Site A links to B; Site B links to C; and Site C links back to Site A. This way there's no "reciprocal linking" which has long caused inbound links to lose value.

Still, the search engines have enough data to easily sniff out these A-B-C schemes and considers them "bad neighborhoods." It can tell that there is an unnatural pattern because all the links only go to each other and because there are no links coming into the bad neighborhood from the rest of the web.

It's close to impossible to get someone else's website (over which you have no control) involved in this kind of scheme without the webmaster's knowledge (since it involves putting links to other bad neighborhood sites on the site).

So if you're a webmaster, don't fall for any "Pay $9.99 for thousands of links instantly" come ons. And don't link to sites that you don't think are of value to your customers.

How one goes about soliciting legitimate and valuable inbound links, well that's a different topic. Probably one of the hardest SEO things to do. But as for the search results being manipulated by malicious competitors - you can rest easy that it just doesn't work like that.

Updated Nov. 24:
There some related discussion on the subject of whether competitors can hurt your site's rankings on a Oct. 12 SearchEngineWatch discussion thread. One of the posters tells of some experiments he has run to test the theory.

Labels: Google, industry buzz, link-building

Posted by Melanie Phung