Hi all,

Interested in feed back on this as i have nowhere else to find an answer

On the basis that "miserable failure" results in the whitehouse site, we can take it as read that Google associates the anchor text link with that of the sites content - yes?

This brings me onto a current problem i have. I feel that a major competitor is trying to damage my site and PR and position in google by obtaining links pointing to pages on my site with Google blacklisted words. On checking my logs i noticed hits to my site in low numbers from 5 drug related sites with grey bars. I have not put these links out and they are anchored to drug related keywords - my site is not in any way asociated to anything dodgy, its a blue chip site.

I have been trying to get these links removed but they are on sites in dodgy locations and its likely my competitor has paid them to do it, but i cant prove it nor do anything about it.

Has anyone any experience of this? is this likely to damage a good site. If google thinks drug keywords point to me wont it associate my site with that? ie the george bush example?

Please help, any thoughts appreciated

It's either just referer spam, where a bot visits your site simply to leave a link in the site logs so if your logs are public it's a backlink.
It you visit the site you won't find any reference to your site.Or it's a scraper site simply scraping content from SEs and displaying it along with their ads/ppc links.
Either way it can't do any harm to your rankings.

Google blacklisted words ?? what are they supposed to be or is this another version of the Google "poison" keywords rubbish?

Official line from google is that competitors cannot harm your rankings. Search for "google bowling" and you will see that many people believe otherwise now. There are even people offering this as a service.

Originally Posted by someguy

There are even people offering this as a service.

And quite probably mugs paying them for the "service"

Only way i can see that you can harm someones rankings is if you get your target to swap links with you and once they post the links to your sites you purposely get them (your own sites) banned out of search engines so the targets site is now linking to banned sites which appears not to be a good thing in googles eyes.

I have never seen any evidence of this happening but I am always worried that one of my link partners will accidently get banned so i dont trade with PR0 pages and i use a link checking program that records pagerank so if any pages come up as a PR0 i drop that link.

Yeah google has said that your ranking can not be damaged by incoming links from "bad sites".
The only way to damage it would be for you to link out to "bad sites". It would make no sense if incoming links could damage your rank because you have absolutley no controll over it.

If someone was trying to damage my ranking by posting it many times on different sites i would wish them the best of luck and thank them for the backlinks.