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Ye Olde Blog of SEO
Nov 12

Should I accept a backlink from my crazy neighbor who sells movie posters online?

I was talking with my crazy neighbor blogger, who would like to remain anonymous.

He wears sweatpants about 350 days out of the year, smokes Marlboro Lights, and has a network of websites that sells movie posters (which I beleive to be bootleg). Somehow he makes a living off of it.

He constantly trolls me about blackhat SEO. He’s been doing blackhat SEO for about 2-3 years and thinks penalties are a myth for sites like his. I talk to him almost once a week about SEO when he is walking his dog, out bbq’ing or just tormenting the neighborhood.

But I usually see him outside smoking late at night, around 2am when the rest of the world is asleep and only internet marketers are awake. We talk on my porch since it has furniture. I have to constantly tell him to keep it down since my wife and kid are asleep upstairs.

seo porch

So he asked one day if I wanted to exchange links.

Hell no!” I told him.

I went on about how I would never want to associate my sites with his, how I’ve been down that road before in the past, and its not the route I wanted to take.

A few weeks pass and I notice just to be an ass he decided to link to a bunch of my websites. He made the most obnoxious anchor texts also. Thank God he didn’t link to my company or I would have knocked on his door and had a conversation with him.

I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about this yet. Really I can’t make him take it down. Of course it is just going to be a huge joke to him.

Do I even care?

What are the “ethical” implications of this?

Will enough of these type of links really count towards a penalty?

I just thought I’d share this funny / interesting memoir as it is something that has annoyed and amused me over the last week or so.

 

About The Author

Patrick is an SEO blogger and the founder of Elite Strategies, an SEO and internet marketing agency located in Delray Beach, FL.