Can You Get Penalized for Inbound Links to Your Site?
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The specifications of Google's filter inspire a lot of heated discussion among webmasters. Lately, many have wondered whether Google penalizes for inbound links to a website coming from a bad neighborhood. Can your competitors sabotage you with a slew of inbound links and cause your SERP to drop? Hugo Guzman takes a skeptical view, and explains why.
“Uh oh. My visual PR on the toolbar is 0! I’ve disappeared from the SERPs...Googlebot hasn’t stopped by in while...
"What happened?! Did one of my inbound links cause this?”
Lately, there seems to have been a lot of heated discussion regarding whether or not it is feasible for inbound links to have a negative impact on SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Position). Many reputable members of the SEO community have chimed in, and it seems as if folks are landing on both sides of the fence on this one. I happen to think this phenomenon is highly unlikely, and in this article I will explain why. However, as with all SEO assertions, you can take my opinion with a grain of salt. Unless you are tight with the majority owners of Google, chances are that you will not get a definitive answer on this one.
Before getting into the specific details regarding why I don’t believe that inbound links alone can get your site penalized, let’s spend some time going over the basic nature of Google’s search engine.
The Google search engine’s main organizing feature is PageRank. Keep in mind that I am not referring to the little green bar on your toolbar (what is commonly referred to as “visual” or “toolbar” PR). I am referring to the internal calculation that is an integral part of Google’s ranking algorithm. The founders of Google created a citation (link) graph of their search engine’s index, which allowed for quick and accurate calculations of a particular Web page’s importance, both in terms of objective citation importance and subjective “human” importance.
Link Trading 
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