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Dan Da Man,<br />
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The real question is, can the crappy links hurt your website rankings? Or they just don't weight as much as relevant links?<br />
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This seems to be the question of the moment.<br />
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Many people say that you can't be negatively influenced by links because that would open a whole 'negative seo' school.<br />
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Others say it hurts and that 'negative seo' is infact a reality.<br />
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What are your thoughts on this?
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Yes and no. Yes in that negative SEO exists and it exists more now than ever. But again you need to know how to do negative SEO. As with my prior post I blast 100,000 blog comments in a 12 hour period for testing purposes. I dont have any negative effect but that does not mean that I couldnt. <br />
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I use over 300 different keywords when I do the blast. I was testing if googles penalties are anchor text related (which I had thought they were). Now, my next test is to do a 100,000 blast on a site using ONE anchor text. I think the results will be very different. I however wont do this on my site and I will do it on a competitor. Google opened the door for this, now as SEOs we need to look at the possibilities.<br />
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So it isn't the link in general. Merely exact anchors are my opinion and every site that made it through the updates all have HUGE HUGE keyword diversification. <br />
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You see, blog comments are shitty links. But how could google give a negative evaluation of that link when there are sites on the web that have tons and tons of blog comments but are decent sites that are all legitimate. This never made sense to me when people said not to blast your site with blog comments. Yes, google will devalue these links but if there is no way for google to tell the difference between a legitimately spammed blog (tons of outbound links and comments that are legitimately posted) and a automated spammed blog, then google wouldnt give a negative evaluation of that link.<br />
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Same goes with massive web 2.0s, wikis, etc... However, google looks for footprints and signs that people are manipulating. As for keyword anchor text. It is obvious that a site trying to manipulate rankings will use the same keyword over and over again. Same with spun content. <br />
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Anytime you hear someone saying garbage that contradicts what I have said, ask them their anchor text portofolio. My sites have over 2,000 to 3,000 different anchor texts and if you were google, you could never tell that my site was trying to target any specific keyword. It looks like random people were just linking to my site saying whatever they thought came to their mind lol.<br />
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Hope that makes sense</div>
