Let me start by saying I don’t want to get on your bad side greek39. I’ve seen enough of your posts to know that you a are a technical person who has good knowledge of how to cause havoc with another site. But my question here is if you had a decent ranking on Yahoo or any other site for a competitive keyword, why in the heck would you give that position up? A good ranking equals good dollars in this business of ours.
As for the question of Google Bowling, there is a very long thread on SEOchat about this. First, I will admit I haven’t spent the time to read through that thread. Second, let me say that Google Bowling doesn’t sound like a legitimate issue. Why would Google create an algorithim that takes into account something that you have not control over. For instance, say that there are 100’s of sites that hate George Bush and all of those sites link to him as a “miserable failure” causing his site to come up first in Google for this search (check it out, it is for real). Does Google now associate anything about George Bush as either miserable or a failure? Not likely. Those sites have all created link text that causes Bush to come up for this search, Google doesn’t have any prejudice for George Bush, it is all part of an algorithm.
So, it is possible for a competitor to buy sitewide links for you and cause your ranking in the SERPs to fall? It sounds plausible, but creates a situation where Google’s algorithim can be manipulated, and the thought that they would allow that is…well, unlikely. Possible, certainly. Does it mean it is so? No really.
I’m not going to pretend to know the answer here as I don’t work for Google, but lets start with a simple question. Has anyone on this forum had a site banned from Google? If so, do you think your site was banned because you had too many sitewide links? Let’s have responses for sites that pursue “white hat” optimization, which included site wide links on relevant web sites and received a Google ban. Anyone here have that happen?