Live update on the impact of poor quality links. A must read!

We have a very interesting update on poor links and their impact. We blogged back in 2013 about the great misconception of a bad backlink. In this blog we stated:

“There's no such thing as a back link that will move you down the Google rankings, there are just links that will not be recognised by the search engines. So bad links will never move you down the rankings they just won’t move you up!”

Although we know that this is still the case, we’ve never been able to show you a live example... Until now!

Over the last 6 months Click Submit has been under attack from a negative link campaign which we think is coming from one of our more aggressive competitors! We noticed bad links being built to our domain from all sorts of strange sites with spammy anchor text, with most of the links coming from adult sites.

See this pie chart breakdown of topics from Majestic SEO:


Potential danger? A very high proportion of links are coming from adult sites.

Our initial reaction was of shock, yet our view was unchanged so we took a snap shot of our most important rankings and monitored the impact. These are as follows:

Powerful SEO – position 1
Resell SEO – position 1
Reseller SEO – position 1
SEO testimonials – position 1
SEO and submission – position 1

By clicking on each of the links above you’ll see that the rankings are unchanged.

So, our suspicions were correct. Google are not penalising bad links but simply ignoring them.

Taking all of this in to account we still believe that showing Google you’re on the ball by submitting a Disavow file is good practice, which we will do now we’ve completed this test.

We hope you found this article interesting and if you have any questions please get in touch.