I’ve traveled around many webmaster, web design and SEO message boards to glean the conventional wisdom of the day and find out what current SEO technology is being used. And, in my travels I’ve heard that most SEO’s and others believe that inbound links from bad neighborhoods such as spam sites won’t hurt another website.

The conventional wisdom is that first Google says so. And, second, if links from other “bad” sites did hurt your site, then this opens up a whole Pandora’s box of competitors sabotaging each other’s websites. Surely, the search engines must protect a website against competitor sabotage?

But, a few months back I happened upon an article at SEOMoz that talked about how some of the most well known names in search engine optimization and marketing view ranking factors from the search engines. On most of the items there was community agreement on issues that were old hat to me.

But, way down at the bottom, the second from the last entry was a section called “Inbound Links from Spam Sites.” Unlike on the message boards, most of the industry professionals who weighed in on this issue agree that inbound links from bad neighborhoods can hurt a website.

Of course, many used qualifiers for their statements, but nonetheless, there it is. Now, this is something I have suspected for a while myself. I suspect the search engines have engaged in a little disinformation in this area in order not the panic the SEO community and set off rogue companies right and left who are bent on sabotaging their competition.

Why would the search engines want to publicly acknowledge that sabotage of competitors was possible? But, what is even more interesting to me is that there is no conventional wisdom regarding this issue in the SEO community. Depending upon which message board, forum, blog, or website you travel to the conventional wisdom can change. And, that itself is enough to give one pause.

Filed under: Link Building