Linking to bad sites
August 14, 2008 on 2:32 pm | In Blackhat SEO |I recently performed a test which actually quite suprised me.
For years there has been the obvious talk of linking to bad neighborhoods but its always been hard to know for sure which sites Google considers “bad”. When I started seeing those “This site may harm your computer.” warnings last year, it got me thinking. But I never really made anything out of it until recently.
When you search for certain terms in Google, you sometimes see sites marked with the aforementioned warning and when you click them, you get taken to a second page giving you another warning about the site having badware (malware,spyware etc). The great thing is, the warnings are based on reports from StopBadware and they provide a wonderful tool which lets you search for Badware sites.
The great thing is, you don’t have to know any urls, you can do a general search such as “online.com” and get back a nice list of sites:
So we have a list of badware sites submitted by Google, sites they have absolutely without a doubt considered to be bad/harmful.
Next I updated a range of different pages to link to these bad sites. Blog posts, blog comments, profile pages and a normal web page. I threw some links at all these sites I had modified and waited for Google to visit them. To my suprise Google visited them, updated the cache showing the badware links but their positions in the serps were not effected at all!
I probably should have also tested it as a sitewide link on a site to see if this would change the outcome. Also I should try changing the links from badware to spammy networks(e.g sites which have recently lost their PR for being spammy/selling links etc) and see how that works out. But in general, is linking to bad sites going to hurt you? Unlikely…
Not to say interlinked networks don’t get hurt 
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Ersun like I said, personality bypass, completely unable to communicate and form relationships, a sloppy coder and in general a totall wanker. You just had to know this prick worked for ****** and a *** Guy was his boss……….
Comment by keniki — 15th August, 2008 #
Well, I won’t blame it on Google since they themselves have the link to those sites in their serps. Secondly, they are pretty much aware that those sites are suspiciously and cunningly doing shady things so there is a possibilty that even legitimate sites by mistake can link to them, even software directories can link to them.
But try experimenting by linking to “link farms”, FFA places, or even sites that sell text link ads and you would have some measurable results.
Comment by Hob — 27th September, 2008 #
Yep I will be experimenting linking to those kind of sites soon
It’s just about finding time to do it 
I do have a good database of link farms, sites that have sold links and lost their PR etc so it shouldn’t be too much work
Comment by admin — 28th September, 2008 #
Great idea. Thanks for doing this. Once I unknowingly had a bunch of pills and porn links hidden on a white site of mine for a long time thanks to some sloppy PHP that allowed a hacker to come on in.
Fortunately it didn’t seem to hurt the site.
Comment by Tony Spencer — 4th October, 2008 #
I would love to get some or all of that list of bad linking sites! I have been trying run some tests and have been working to get a domain flagged/penalized for a while now and have been going the way for trying to get it flagged for malware, but it just seems as though Google simply will not give my domain a penalty. But maybe if I can get a bunch spammy/poor sites to link to the domain that would work. Any suggestions on how to quickly trash my own domain? I have a whole slew of experiments that I want to run once I can get my domain trashed.
Tony, it sounds like you are referring to the WP hack where people can basically go into your DB and drop some spammy links like that without you even knowing. I have had a few clients that had that problem.
Comment by TheresNoLuvLikeLinkLuv — 18th November, 2008 #