A word of caution about link building

[Melvinjames18]

Thanks for sharing, I just think Google changes everyday, I can't even catch it. Some usual SEO ways seems out of date now.

[patmcluk]

I can't understand how they can tell people to "clean up" blog comments. Surely you can only do that on your own websites. Maybe they will penalize the sites that allow spammers to post, and make these sites invisible, but surely you can't visit all your previous blog posts and delete them?
Personally i count the success of my articles by the amount of comments i get! (Although all spammers are deleted immediately.)
I reckon we can just look after our own sites and let google worry about the spammers!

[Michael Martinez]

Part of Google's strategy may be to scare people into thinking twice about poisoning both their own sites (with bad inbound links) and other people's sites.

At the end of the day, you can only manage the links over which you have complete control. But though people may conclude that Google won't penalize a site for attracting too many suspicious links, I think that is a very risky approach.

Most Websites don't draw that many links. Nor do most business sites end up getting hammered by poison link campaigns.

The percentage of sites that might be attacked in such a way by unscrupulous competitors is extremely small. Hence, there is too little smoke to screen people who want to take a risk and keep dropping links.

I would take Google's comment very seriously:

If I spammed comment fields of third party sites, what should I do?

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you've cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

If someone feels like they have been targeted by a poison link campaign, they can ask Google to take that into consideration.

I think the best approach is to expand your traffic sources as much as possible to include other search engines, directories, and other sites. Ignore all the so-called search market share reports that tell you Google drives 60-80% of all search traffic. That is not true. Those reports are flawed because they are counting page views and not the actual amount of traffic the search engines pass to other sites.

[ThePower]

Google is way ahead of a majority of SEO'ers and their techniques - thats why the ones who are good can charge massive amounts.
In terms of this thread - I believe Google looks at the link footprint - so if ALL your links, or possibly over a certain %, are all from this method, then yes, you could get penalised.
If some are, then probably not. This then negates the sabotage method - why would you drop these links for a site that has no links already and therefore probably not ranking? You may try and sabotage an already established site, but the chances are they'll have a lot of other links already built.

Lets face it, if we could second guess Google all the time what would we do with all our time!!!

[pokeragain]

Thank you for all the tips in this thread. Google is refining their algorithm all the time, and spammers should be all burn in hell. I thank Matt Cutts for cleaning up the Web and making it a better place to surf.

[pokerextras]

Check out the link profile for justchillz.net. It's a brand new site that's on page one for rakeback. If links really did hurt sites, that site would be deindexed.