what to do about having an image accused of blog spam?

Well here’s the deal, The Blog Spam icon appears when the page has a ‘higher than normal’ level of inbound links from blogs. I wouldn’t worry to much about this as I doubt Google would ever penalize this or any site for inbound links from blogs.

Reason 1: What if this person has an amazing article or insight that bloggers found interesting. You can get hundreds, thousands, or more blog links overnight, that’s the nature of blogs and bloggers.

Reason 2: Google will never penalize for inbound links. If they did that would be a great way to get your competitors banned by Google!

If the links are blog spam they will count for very little or nothing in the eyes of Google. I’m sure the G! algo takes into account whether a blog uses Captcha and how effective that Captcha is when determining the ‘weight’ links from that blog will carry.

In my opinion if I am exchanging links with someone I expect that their site has something to offer my readers, that the site be linking out to quality sites, that there not be hundreds and hundreds of out links and lastly does the site visually look nice or interesting (not spammy).

Just my 2 cents on the matter.
-PhilipSEO

Hi and thank you for your reply.

Have you ever heard of “google bowling”?

it is controversial but some in fact most the people I know that i respect on the subject of seo (which admittedly doesn’t take a lot since I know so little but these people are very successful … so much so I could probably live the rest of my life off what they make in a year or two … granted I”m old)

and anyway they seem to think that blog spamming actually can hurt you and I was told if I went that route (which I have not … yet) then not to over do my posts or it would hurt me not help.

I understand your POV and am inclined to agree because I don’t feel a site should ever be penalized for incoming links because you have no control over it but I don’t make the rules and am having a tough time living by them lol.

There’s a thread here somewhere at CAP about google bowling.

Well my understanding of Google Bowling is giving a site a huge number of links for the same term and as a result it rises in the serps. This was done to G. W. Bush’s white house page for incompetent or something like that (I can’t remember).

I wouldn’t believe any who says they can hurt your site by google bowling it. Sure they could make it rank for some less than desirable terms, or I guess they could hurt you by getting another site to outrank you for a term you are ranking for.

There are 3 things to remember about Google Bowling, you can’t be banned by G! because of Google Bowling, the results of Google Bowling are short lived, and G! is on the lookout for Google Bowling and closing the lane ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

Of course I reserve the right to be wrong ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

I reserve the right to be wrong

that probably should have been what I called myself instead of bb1 ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

@Philipseo 194108 wrote:

Well my understanding of Google Bowling is giving a site a huge number of links for the same term and as a result it rises in the serps. This was done to G. W. Bush’s white house page for incompetent or something like that (I can’t remember).
)

You’re talking about Google Bombing, not Google Bowling. Google Bombing is when a bunch of sites link to a page with a given phrase as anchor text in order to make it rank for a phrase.

Google Bowling is when you knock a site (someone else’s) out of the SERP’s by getting a bunch of spammy links to it.

I’ve yet to see convincing evidence that Google Bowling works or is very common.

Bah forget my past post, I ending describing Google Bombing. But still I’d be surprised if Google Bowling still worked or ever really worked. It first appeared back in 2005 so G! has had 4 years to figure Google Bowling out.

Good answers from Philip.

The bad neighbor checker that you are using works fine. Its not 100% as you’ve seen so look at each link it targets. I also look at tools like the WOT voting tool to monitor my linking websites. Its based off of user feedback and scoring, and also lets good/bad comments to be shown.

No-follow’s say the site that is linked to is not endorsed by the linking website. Its designed for a link poster rather than a link recipient. So if you have an incoming link that you have identified as potentially having a negative effect, I would block it.

At the end of the day though I have found that once I can identify the bad links, I just firewall at the server and if you have drawn any penalty, submit the URL for reinclusion through Webmaster Central.

Gary I don’t know that i have any penalty but rather am certainly hoping to avoid it.

can you explain WOT? sorry to be so dumb ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

Hi bb1webs,

Sorry mate, I got sidetracked by another comment that was made and misunderstood the issue; Its not the other site linking to you its you linking to a site that was penalised for blog spam.

Its still a simple answer; add a nofollow tag. Your friend will still have a link, just not the PR bleed.

WOT is Web of Trust and its a firefox plugin that lets you see the reviews of others regarding security, spam content, malicious software and so on. It has a way to go but its a quick way to see if anyone on the web has ranked a site dangerous, and I think based on where search is going, may be a great ranking tool if not a quick head’s-up on a site you are going to link to or from.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.