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
-
Is it OK to Leave Links in Comments ?
It may sound silly ... Just wondering to see your opinion about leaving link on blogs; keyword as name with site link or link in the comment text as long as its relevant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mustansar0 -
SEO companies that own linking properties
Hi everyone, I do some SEO work for a personal injury attorney, and due to his profession, he gets cold-called by every digital marketing company under the sun. He recently got called by a company that offers packages that include posting in multiple directories (all on domains they own), creating subdomains for search listings, and PR services like writing and distributing press releases for distribution to multiple media outlets. The content they write will obviously not be local. All this and more for less than $500 a month! I'm curious if any of you have any experience with companies like this and whether you consider them black hat. I realize I'm asking you to speculate on a very broad description of what they offer, but their linking strategies sound risky to me. What experiences have you had with companies like this? Do you know anyone who has ever gotten a penalty using these tactics? Thanks, in advance, for sharing your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ptdodge0 -
Backlink, how to delete or find who is linking to me?
Hi there guys, Can someone tell me how I go about finding who is linking to my site or how to find backlinks to my site and if it is a spam site or a site I don't know or want linking to me, how to stop them from linking to me and also how to delete their link? Thanks appreciate the time Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Rank Drop Possibly due to links but no warning in GWT
Hello, We've been experiencing rank drop in all major keywords for the past 9 months. I've had different people say different things here at Moz about how backlinks effect rank drop. Brilliant answers, but different opinions. Nothing is showing up in GWT for this site. Here's the backlink breakdown: 72 linking root domains. 20 of those are blogs. These blogs have no backlinks in and of themselves, and were created originally as easy links. Not white hat stuff. Three additional root domains are still paid links in this profile, though all but one was made to look editorial. The one that doesn't look editorial has links sprinkled throughout their website, among other paid links. The rest of the linking root domains (49) are legitimate. Again, nothing shows up in GWT. We had 96 root domains last March but in March of 2013 we cut most of the paid links and half (20) of the blogs. This brought our ranking down immediately by 2 or 3 slots. We've been slipping every since. I would like people to speak from experience and let me know if you think the backlinks could be causing the ranking drop and what to do about it. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Article pages not ranking as well as they should
Hello, Our articles here are not ranking as strongly as they should. Could you take a look and tell me why? When I search for the exact article title we do not come up. We used to. Note our sitewide footer links to some articles in case that's the problem, but even articles not in the footer links aren't performing.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How Would You Go About Building a Private Link Network?
Assuming you need to build a private link network from scratch, how would you go about doing it? I am not looking for some shady tactic, but rather something that would be white hat, yet will help in our SEO efforts. Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ConversionChamp0 -
Good link networks?
Hey Mozzers, quick question about link networks. I've identified quite a few, like these: Build My Rank Unique Article Wizard Authority Link Network Article Ranks EZ Article Link Socialadr Linkvana SEO LinkVine Does anyone have experience using any of these? The basic premise is they own or their members own tons of different blogs. You write an article, give it to them, they publish it one one of those blogs. You include a link in your article. Done. They charge a monthly fee to use and all that, so is it worth it? Anyone had any success with them? Finding mixed things on forums online, and since many of their websites like awfully spammy, wanted to poll the Mozzers and get your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
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