Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value
-
Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value. By this I mean, if you do have links from link farms and bad neighbourhoods, would it effectively pull you down in search engine rankings. Or is it more that it's just a waste of time to get these links, as it adds no value to your ranking.
Are google saying avoid them because it will not have a positive effect, or avoid them becuase it will have a negative effect.
I am under the opinion that it will not harm, but it will not help either. I think this because at the end of the day you are not 100% in control of your inbound links, any bad site could add you and if a competitor, god forbid, wanted to play some black hat games, couldn't they just add you to thousands of bad sites to pull your ranking down?
Interested to hear your opinions on the matter, or any "facts" if they are out there.
-
I have thought about this, it would not be too many companies that would do this, one there is a cost in doing so if you are a small company, also there is a huge risk if caught doing so, I am sure that the costs of getting caught would be huge.
-
it is really interesting what happens if a competitor starts a bad PR or such a bad links campaign. Large numbers of bad links from totally irrelevant websites. How does google prevent that? Any ideas on that topic?
-
I have a friend in the SEO community and he tried getting some bulk links for his site and it did more than good. When testing this strategy he saw his site drop from the first page of google to the fourth page. It took him nearly half a year to get his site back on page one of google.
If you are worried about competitors adding bad links to your site than I think the best strategy is to get the best natural back links to combat the bad ones.
-
You must of missed it, bing also can hurt you for bad links. look for the word hurt
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/31/link-farms-and-like-farms-don-t-be-tempted.aspx -
yea but the big difference is bing does not penalize sites for bad links google does and getting knocked out of google is majorly crippling to a website due to their search engine dominance.
bad links can definitely take a site down in google. always keep an eye on your incoming links to make sure competition isn't doing any harmfiul linking to your site, and always concentrate on getting good clean links yourself to strengthen your site making it harder for bad links to affect you.
-
Here is a article from bing on the subject
-
There is a ton of information available concerning this topic. I would recommend using the Search function to find information.
In short, bad links can harm a site. The question is how many of a site's inbound links are harmful. If you have a site with 100 links and 90 of them are bad, then you have a problem. If you have a site with 10k links and 1k are bad, you are fine. You want a good overall link profile.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How much value does these have on SEO?
how much value doesn't having an address a phone numbe an https rather than http i appreciate any help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
How to remove this type of external link from Google
Hello, My website has been hacked few days Before, But after resolved it It is generating bad links, So i am Dis-vowing it , But as it is generating links like this,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | innovativekrishna1
http://domain.com/a></p><h1>DIXCEL HS-typeスリットディ
i am Not able to disavow it As it generating Spacing between. So my question is : Is there any Way to remove this Type of link from google???
If any body know Please Let me know, I need Do remove this As soon as possible,
please Help, Thank you0 -
Exchange link from sites in same google account
Hi everyone, Anybody have experience when you have some websites which stored in Google Webmaster Tool and they exchange links between sites. So is it good for sites? We are hosted on different server. Thank you so much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jeepster0 -
About link building in 2015?
I don't think we still can use the same link buildings tools of years ago. So, how relevant is this article (from 2009):
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nans
http://moz.com/blog/17-ways-search-engines-judge-the-value-of-a-link Or is there any update? Nancy1 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Homepage bombed from rankings 2
I've had some varying advice on here regarding the best way to proceed with [i'll PM the URL] which was hit by Penguin 2.0. There were previous issues with the homepage and before the 22nd had started creating new decent links. Some have suggested to ditch the domain and start again. There are several reasons not to and branding is the deciding factor at this stage. I'm going down the route of initially trying to manually remove links and then follow on with disavow. I would really appreciate another pair of eyes taking a quick look to see if i'm missing anything other than a dodgy link profile.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Hello i have been hit for external links
Hello my web has been hit for external links maybe because of the work of SEO consultants y had before. The web name is http://www.propdental.com Some seo consultants will try to use the disalow tools on webmaster tools other recomends to do another web with the content wich is very rich and start over again with a new domain I would like to know what is your opinion thank you very much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
If I were to change the geographic keyword such as "foreclosures in Dallas" on 20 related blogs to "foreclosures in Los Angeles" what would happen?
In other words I'm wondering if someone built up an internet presence for their company through multiple websites over the years and then decided to move to another part of the united states, would it work to change all the keywords to the new location? Would that work toward getting them ranked in the new area or would you have to create entirely new websites? Thanks guys.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whorneff3100