Dear Cricket,

Recently I noticed that there are some unsavory websites linking to my site. I am concerned that this could reflect poorly on the credibility of my business or affect my search standings in Google.

Can anything be done to stop these bad incoming links to my sites?
 

Tina Clarke, England
Original Abstract Art

Hi Tina!

Beyond contacting the webmasters of the websites you mentioned and requesting that they not link to you, there is very little that can be done to stop bad incoming links. The good news though is that it really does not reflect on the credibility of your business at all, as you are not linking back to those websites.

Unless there were literally hundreds (if not thousands) of incoming links all using undesirable anchor text it would be rare to have an impact on your website in the search engines.

You may have heard of Google Bombing which is when a specific phrase leads to a certain site in the search engines, based entirely on a tremendous number of incoming links leading to a specific page using specific anchor text links. Since the websites you are concerned about are highly competitive, the odds of this happening would be slim.

“There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.” Google Webmaster Help

Since I also find it highly unlikely that those visitors looking for the type of site you mentioned would be the same target audience that you are focused on, I would not waste a single moment of time worrying about it. Only concern yourself with those things you can control and do not even think of worrying about those things that you cannot.

UPDATE January 25, 2007 Google announced changes to help minimize the impact of Googlebombs on search results.

“By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.” Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

I WILL DEFINITELY SEE YOU AT THE TOP!

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