I think with time Google’s business model and algorithm will get bloated which means that there is going to be much more room for problems, issues, failures and so on.

So far Google has been pretty incredible. Their search results have been the best in my opinion, even though at an odd occassion I have managed to find more material with MSN search.

If what you are saying here proves to be true Google will be under major threat, however so far they have proved that they can deal with any issue, especially when it comes to fixing search problems and exploits.

Regards,

Jason Grant
http://www.flexewebs.com

This is a great article. I have written an article called 20 Bad Ideas – Black Hat SEO Practices, at http://btw73.blogspot.com/2007/11/20-bad-ideas-black-hat-seo-practices.html and linked to this post as a reference. Take a look!
Thanks,
Brian

That is a great solution… rather than penalizing.. they just don’t count sites that are marked as text link sales sites… then this whole google bowling thing would go away…

penalizing for bad links isn’t the answer… because anyone can get links to any website.. they should just ignore!!

then inevitably… people would figure out that its a waste of time trying to manipulate the algorithims and focus on making a helpful site lol

For the previous readers, I think Google has already implemented his suggested strategy or something similar. Linking to a ‘bad neighbourhood’ definitely will affect your rankings, but not getting a link from one. You can control who you are linking to, but not who is linking to you.

I don’t think Google Bowling is possible. I have seen no material that states that this will remove you from the search engines or apply a penatly. If anything those links are probably just ignored.  I think it would make no sense for google to penalise sites that buy links in. They probably reduce the value of sites that sell links though.

Google Bowling in theory should not be possible.

Indeed, what you said is very much scary. I would like to see Google not counting the suscicious links.  Even I had the same fear when the announcement came that paid links and sitewide links may get penalty. That’s quite unfair and very much deplorable.

And as you say, crooks are not only in small firms, the large ones have huge amounts of money and any competitor arises against them, they can easily shower hell on them through this manipulative strategy, I guess. Also, by link building to the competitor from wrong neighborhoods like adult sites can be another headache right? I hope Google does as you say.

Lenin Nair

Creative writing blog

Interesting stuff.  As a private investigator I have been involved with black hat, white hat and defamation.  Some of the people I track down even purchased the name John Brewington to build domains with scurlous and incorrect information in an attempt to get me to back off.

I have been forced to learn the same game but this is not a level playing field.  I am compelled to follow rules whereas they are not.  Insiteful article.  You have to hope they done learn this little trick.

good information to because this is new information for me… thanks

Is there any follow up to this article as it is something i have always been worried about..?

I’ve just launched a website about a week ago and I think I already got google bowled… I listed my site in an aggressive forum on a signiture and today its been completely removed. Typing in the full address won’t even show up. Its crazy because my yahoo listing still shows up.. This is a pretty shady way of taking out the competition and I aggree… I’ve only had the site up for a week and it has already been trashed.. Is there anything I can do to get relisted?

Aaron
http://www.dilusiauto.com

In an update to a comment I made earlier, I had a website that had been google bowled. And I truely think it had been. But, I was able to get my site out of the ditch by doing more link building. So, if this happens to you, just be sure to get back on track and keep link building.

Aaron
Super Sport Camaro

I agree…and this article is old now. Google Bowling is pretty much dead from what I have read.

How can Google differenciate between a sponsor that has a logo accross all pages of a website, or a seal program accross all pages of a client and Google bowling? I don’t think that this article is accurate anymore – Google is way past the days of primitive manipulation and SEO terrorism. It all comes down to Trust, Relevancy and user experience – unless you are trying to rank for some uncompetetive keyword like paperclip in a tiny uncompetetive country like chile then anything will work.

We had a spam site copy our content (thousands of pages) back in september. the retards did not remove some of our header links, so now 1000s of spam pages are linking to 1000s of our pages. lo and behold, we were hit with a 90+ penalty late october. our site is 100% legit with minimal to no seo – needless to say, we went from 40k visits / day to 500 visits. now, we are trying to contact google, we logged dmcas, went through wmt but still almost a month after the penalty THERE IS NO WORD FROM GOOGLE. they are behaving in a way microsoft did in the late nineties, they are vain and w/out regard to the web community (they do have a fake one though – but honestly, they just care about them hitting the quaterly numbers to please the street) – it’s a shame and they will eventually pay the price, just like msft did, just like ebay did. the businesses that act in such ways will sooner or later be overthroned. and all that ‘dont be evil’ stuff – it’s rediculous. they purposely chose not to hire customer service so they can continue to enjoy redicoulous profits while us who work hard building a page after page suffer. GOOGLE IS EVIL.

Nice aritcle but out of date. said by ??