[pete4adult]

what I mean is can a competitor harm your rankings by buying a load of spammy links ?

[Tigger]

I think with Panda there is less chance of this happening than before but I have no real proof, it's just the general feeling I have from everything I've read. Basically if links are viewed as spammy like sidewide/ sidebar links rather a penalty being given they are just ignored

[pete4adult]

cheers Tigs - I was having a discussion with another webmaster and he was 100% sure he could get me banned by buying a load of links .....had me worried for a while

[Tigger]

send him over here I'll set Ian on him

[sunfunbill]

Actually it has been talked about quite a bit in some private mainstream forums that you can indeed hurt a site with spammy links. Now we are talking mainstream sites, not adult ones.

But I assume that if someone bought 2,000 spammy directory, pharma and other crappy links and pointed those to any site,,,,, it would crash that site.

It has happened many times unintentionally by newbies that don't know what they are doing to their very own sites. So if you can do it to yourself, surely someone else can do it to you.

[Tigger]

whether its mainstream or adult Bill it all comes down to the link and I'm under the belief that spammy links don't get penalized they just get discounted / ignored so that applies to bought ones - needless to say no one knows for sure

[pete4adult]

I suppose when you think about it makes sense that the links are ignored - so this means anything that G is unsure about quality wise just gets dropped into the spammy / ignore list

[Worzel]

Originally Posted by pete4adult

I suppose when you think about it makes sense that the links are ignored - so this means anything that G is unsure about quality wise just gets dropped into the spammy / ignore list

That makes the most sense to me, though obviously, as says, nobody but G knows for sure.

But G must be at least aware of the possibility of malicious links - it's not like everyone is as sweet natured as the folks around here, and putting the boot in is human nature. Given that G is dead against artificially boosted rankings, it's logical to assume they'd be against artificial downgrading of sites too, for the same reasons - they both ball up the natural order of the web as represented in their index. Since it would be difficult to tell which sites were trying to artificially boost their rankings, and which were the victim of a malicious linking campaign, it would be better to just ignore spammy links.