Rocketfish: Search Engine Marketing

Let us be absolutely clear – Google do not ban you for bad inbound links.  If Google do not like the links they will just not count them.

If Google banned sites for poor inbound links then you could sabotage any site or competitor on the internet.  All you would have to do is point a lot of poor quality links at the web site you wanted to attack and Google would ban them! Clearly this cannot and does not happen.

Techno Boffins often like to quote high profile sites that got caught buying links and were banned from Google.  Let me clarify this – these high profile sites didn’t get banned what happens is that one day a site might have 1000 inbound links and be enjoying top spot on Google.  Google identifies 500 links that it doesn’t like the look of and stops counting them therefore this site now only has 500 inbound links that Google recognises and therefore it doesn’t have as many as other sites and moves down the rankings.  If they replace the missing 500 links with quality links they will move back up the rankings.

As I have stated I don’t like buying links or third party link programmes for this reason (I can fully understand why other SEO companies use them).  I think small to medium sized businesses in particular need much more control and sustainability when it comes to their SEO and traffic generation and this is why we have developed the link strategy that we have for our clients.