10 Crippling SEO Myths Debunked

[UKSBD]

In my opinion the message in Webmaster tools is a warning that Google has found unnatural links pointing to your site and may be checking your site.

They then only check a very small % but the fact webmasters get the message mean they do the cleaning up anyway.

The sites that do get penalised are probably sites that have been checked and there is an obvious connection.
i.e
they have a links page to similar sites in the network or links to the SEO company involved.

It's very clever of Google
Send out a million warnings and you get a million webmaster cleaning up their own sites or questioning what their SEO has been doing

 

[terryuk]

But thats not really a good analogy is it? I'm not saying an hour spent on the web makes someone an SEO expert but they *can* learn the basics and we are talking about the basics here. That coupled with a tool like scrapebox or xrumer which does alot of the lifting for you and you are away.

I guess as someone said depends on other factors; domain age, on page optimisation, diversity of links etc as to if you can affect someone else's ranking.

O and just found a case study where doing exactly this did take a site down http://www.saasaffiliates.com/testi...ates-to-competitors-hurting-your-web-ranking/

Gary

Most websites will harm themselves without needing a competitor to do it for them, at some point along time someone gets sloppy and takes the shortcut and wham. And another business replaces you.

That being said scrapebox & xrumer produce junk for the most people who use it and easily detected to some level - much worse things to happen. Code injections 'this site may harm your computer' and all sorts.

 

[open sesame]

I personally think nofollow links will effect rankings and ive been saying it for a long time now.

BUT I do think it stops link juice passing through otherwise PR sculpting would not work.

I do believe Google still takes the link into account with it's algo.

Matt Cutts:

Now let’s talk about the rel=nofollow attribute. Nofollow is method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext [*].

Resources: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

But he does not say nofollow does not count for anything.

My 2p worth.