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An important element in ranking in Google is having other websites linking to your website. Simple enough, right? So simple that Google has written algorithms that try to penalize people for gaming their system.
If you gain too many “backlinks,” too soon; have lots of spammy backlinks; or both; you can trigger the penalty algorithms. These algos will assassinate your website and leave it in the land of the domain dead. You will no longer exist to the hundreds of millions of Google searchers.
The problem with these deadly algos, is that your competitors can “build” massive spammy links to your website, and potentially get you banned. Google denies this as possible, but I believe this to be a pernicious lie. I’ve seen first hand (but not by my hand) sites receiving the death ray of backlinks from their competitors and shortly after being penalized.
Having this bit of knowledge makes it easy to be paranoid when it comes to having mafia-like competitors. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t really stop cousin Guido from attaching cement boots to your website and taking it out for a swim in the world wide web.
A couple of months ago I reached out to my programming genius friend Milan and shared my concerns. He sent me the below code to put in my .htaccess file. The code makes it so the designated spammy backlink coming to your site will redirect to Google.com instead (or any other website you specify).
I am not completely certain that Google will disregard the backlinks you use this code with. It makes sense that they would, since you are telling the search engine bots to not come to your website. If doesn’t work, at least you can whine to them and show them your efforts in stopping your evil Sith Lord competitors from destroying you!
CODE TO USE IN YOUR .HTACCESS FILE
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.google.com/ [R=301,L]
P.S. I will be writing a quick post in the next few days giving you resources on how to check who is linking to your site. This way you can keep track of the links that are coming in.
April 25, 2011 was the day my competition dumped thousands of bad backlinks onto my website. It was a Monday, and I refer to it as Black Monday. I have never been able to recover! I have to try this out and see if I can get the penalty removed. I will let you know my results. Thanks for a great article!
As far as I know the code you got from your “programming genius” will not work for Google bot. Google bot will not let you know HTTP_REFERRER that you can forward the bot to another website. Timu recently posted..…
April 25, 2011 was the day my competition dumped thousands of bad backlinks onto my website. It was a Monday, and I refer to it as Black Monday. I have never been able to recover! I have to try this out and see if I can get the penalty removed. I will let you know my results. Thanks for a great article!
As far as I know the code you got from your “programming genius” will not work for Google bot. Google bot will not let you know HTTP_REFERRER that you can forward the bot to another website.
Timu recently posted..…
Thanks Timu for your comment. At the time of writing this post Google did allow us to know the HTTP_REFERRER.