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Can your competitors destroy your site with spam backlinks?
Just a random thought that came into my mind while I was doing some link-building for my site. If my competitor wanted to wipe me off the first page of Google, can’t they just buy super cheap and spammy backlinks to my website from link farms and horrible PBNs??
A quick search on Fiverr, and there are sellers who are generating **1 million backlinks** (yes, you read that correctly!!) in like a few days from extremely spammy link farms and softwares. Claiming that these links are “safe”. It’s as cheap as $10-200 bucks.
If someone just paid one of these sellers to swarm my site with like 100k+ backlinks per day, then wouldn’t Google hit me with a penalty or something? Especially if it’s like a local business instead of a large blogging website. Can’t these sellers basically wipe off the rankings for small businesses?
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1 Reply
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No
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No. Google stopped considering spam links years ago.
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Back in 2010 people use to do this,in fact my dentist seo agency did this to him because he cancel his services. These days Google just ignores spam backlinks.
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Theoretically, it’s possible for spammy backlinks to harm a website’s SEO, but Google has become quite sophisticated and usually identifies such manipulative tactics. They have systems like the Penguin algorithm update to mitigate the impact of such low-quality links. However, it’s always good to monitor your backlink profile and disavow any suspicious links using Google’s Disavow tool. Nurturing high-quality, organic links is the best strategy for sustainable SEO success.
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Yes, in theory, competitors or malicious individuals can attempt to harm a website’s search engine rankings by creating a large number of spammy backlinks pointing to that site. This practice is known as negative SEO. Search engines, like Google, take into account the quality and relevance of backlinks when determining a website’s authority and ranking in search results. If a site accumulates a substantial number of spam backlinks, it could signal to search engines that the site is engaging in manipulative practices, and as a result, the site’s rankings may suffer.
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no
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Google just gives them no value. If they gave penalties it would be so easy for competitors to nuke your rankings.
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easily.
1. They can create proxy sites (exact clone of your site) with exact match anchors (which was internal on your website).
2. They can create follow links to your site from guestbooks/bad forums/comments/fresh domains/etc. Even nofollow links from these sites are dangerous.
3. They can slowly generate lot of bad articles on new domains and link your website with keyword anchors.
4. If they want to destroy your site, they can purchase few expired domains and slowly post chatgpt articles (as is) or snippets with links to your site. It can be keyword anchor links or domain links. At some point google will penalize even established website for it.You can have negative seo attack (lot of links in short time) = google will see it and devalue these links. But if spammers doing it slowly – these links can be really dangerous and kill even established website.
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I would not worry too much about it and loose any sleep. Those paying people on Fiverr (or anywhere else for that matter) have just wasted their money. You can check your Google search console for any manual actions from Google. A competitor can’t hurt you. Only you can hurt yourself.
Now, go grab a good cup of coffee (or any preferred drink) and relax.
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Everyone says Google ignores spam links, but I’ve seen spam links help and hurt sites. Google is not some all-knowing being, and these spam links can hurt a site.
Until Google stops using backlinks as a ranking factor, then links can be used to help or hurt websites.
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Yes, but not how you think
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This is an old tactic, Google just ignores it now
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Haha no my company got hit with thousands of backlinks with a negative anchor text and it did nothing. My boss was freaking out and I was like “why they aren’t effecting anything”
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Let me help you out – if Google sees tens of thousands of spammy backlinks – what will happen? Nothing. They’re unlikely to have popped out of the ether – if they’re on the market for that kind of price, then those domains were flagged over the past 14 years. If not multiple times.
Google knows almost every public domain out there – within a handful that have just been recently registered. A thousand backlinks is never just going to pop out of nowhere.
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