SEO Step By Step Guide– 82. What is Google Bowling?

Have you heard of the term Google Bowling? Many of us would not have heard this term before. What is Google Bowling, is it good for our site or bad for our website? Google bowling is used as one of the black hat tricks by some unscrupulous webmasters to get your website into problem. Yes, you read it correctly, it is a trick that webmasters use to thwart the results of their competitors’ websites in Google. How do they do it and is it really true that Google allows such a menace?

Google does not allow such a menace but it is more of cranky brains at work to use one of  Google’s algorithms. You must have already heard that Google values back links very highly. You must also heard that Google likes them to be genuine links and not links bought from link farms and other sites that sell links. Google penalizes sites that buy such links. How does Google penalize the sites that uses links from link farms and other such sources? Your site’s ranking will drop on the search results page or it can totally disappear from Google’s index. Google takes such severe steps against manipulative link building procedures. This is misused by those who engage in Google bowling. What they do is to buy links for their competitors instead for their websites. It sounds a rather nasty strategy to fight one’s competition, but remember this can happen.

If you see that your website’s link to soar high suddenly and if it does not correspond to your efforts, then you need to be careful. Some webmasters are happy about getting sudden hike in their links and they do not really care from where those links came. These additional free links can hurt your ranking very badly. This also tells us that we should make sure to check the links count for our website regularly. You should pay close attention to the sudden drop of links as well as for sudden hike in the number of links. Both should be a matter of concern to any webmaster who is concerned about his or her online presence and online reputation.

Google bowling is certainly not an ethical practice and you must stay away from all such practices. You should rather use straightforward and authorized methods to outdo your competitors and not through back stabbing. In case you have been a victim of Google bowling, you must make sure to trace the sources of those free links that caused you the trouble.

You will be able to save yourself from a lot of troubles by keeping track of your website’s ranking and the links. You can be easily mislead to think that your link building efforts are working while actually that free links are working against you.

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