Can many backlinks damage a site’s ranking?

Posted by Rainer on November 26th, 2007 at 10:36am

I just came across this question:

Here is the situation. I owned a website since 2005 and since them it had for the whole time less than 200 backlinks.

Website was optimized had all the tags H1, H2 and was optimized for specific keyword in extremely competitive industry (insurance) and was gettgin ranked pretty high.

Within last 3 months we have added over 1600 backlinks from all kinds of websites, blogs, press releases, article sites and Directories. All the backlinks were created with proper targeted anchor text.

After doing that the website dropped 10 spots on Google.

Can backlinks damage your website ranking? Does it have anything to do with creating a lot of back links in short amount of time? Is there such thing as too many backlinks?

Backlinks can damage a site’s ranking if they are from a bad neighborhood. This is clear for paid links, which are hunted by Google. But Google and others also try to identify spam sites and backlinks from them can actually reduce your reputation. So one should wisely choose where to try to get backlinks from. Also, backlinks not related to the sites theme (e.g. technical sites if your site is about insurance) and many of them from many different themes may discredit your site.

It has also been reported that rapid and quick growth of backlinks may result in punishment. But I have never seen any evidence for this. I think the root cause here was not the growth of backlinks but the other factors I outlined above.

I have recently written about TrustRank and there is some information in that article on bad neighborhoods taking away trust in your site. You may want to have a glimpse at it…

Under linkbuilding