Does your website get downgraded if you link to a lower quality site?
-
My site has a pr of 4. My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques. I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.
-
The friend of mine with the pr2 site has some unique content that will benefit my readers. I conducted an email interview with him. I like the content and it brings value to my readers.
-
I was thinking about this issue as well. I would think that pr 9 sites have to link down. No where else to go. Plus, pr 6 or 7 sites are somewhat authoritative. However, I'm just building my trust factor at pr4. If i link to a pr 2 site and google finds something wrong with the pr2 site, then would they assume that I can't be trusted.
-
I would look at this in a holistic manner. First of all, why would you link? Is this just for backlinking/ranking purposes? Then don't do it.
But are you asking because your friend has actual content you want to share? In THAT case, is the content (topic) relevant to the content on your site? And do you generally only link out to other sites for the sake of sharing the content on them? If so for both, I don't see anything wrong with it. And if it is just to share the content, you can just nofollow it too for added "security".
But if its just to try and get your buddy a link, don't bother.
-Dan
-
If you think about this question in more general terms, you'd never see CNN or New York Times link anywhere, since most sites have a lower PR than they do. And on the flip side, if I have a site with very little PR about pinball games, I'm not going to link to a site with a higher PR that's about buying pills that's full of spam.I don't have enough personal experience for your particular situation to offer an expert opinion for this case, however.
-
I see your point. I know him personally. He hired someone to build his website and offered him a cut of the revenue that he brings in. I did a bit of background check on his website since it appeared that he was ranking for a very competitive keyword. I don't think that he knows that his website programmer which gave him very good ranking for a difficult keyword might be doing it with black hat techniques.
perhaps, i should clarify. I'm a novice at this. What i saw was comment spamming with different aliases on very high ranked websites. I'm not sure if this is black hat techniques. Also, I'm not sure if this is not allowed. I didn't think that his seo guy was up to par since he used different aliases to comment. His username had a link to my friends website.
I hope that this helps to explain the situation and what i saw.
-
Probably not, although if he is acting unethically is this someone you want your customers/perspective customers seeing you involved with?
w00t!
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
-
Why homepage is not getting cached by Google ?
It has been more than 2-3 months that I didn't notice that our website homepage is not getting cached by Google ?? i don't know why?? help me please, thanks in advance. Regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | spellblaster
Spel why.PNG0 -
Suggestion for Link Directory Script?
I own a subscription to PHP Link Directory but was wondering if anyone could suggest an alternative link directory script/software/service to PHPLD. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fergusonconsulting0 -
Link-Building - Directories
Hello, The SEO world is a bit confuse in the last months with the Google Antartic updates. Its normal since Google is trying to kill SEO to have more Adwords publicity results. My most recent doubt is about directories. I heard Matt Cutts from Google in a recent Google Hangout saying that registering a website in directorys was ok, but not the ideal method to become relevant in the internet world. However it seems that this procedure is not against the Google policies. Now, here in the forums, I already saw someone writing about adding your site to directories and how dangerous that situacion is. So, whats your opinion about adding your site to free and pay directories as first link-building strategy? If directories are out of the question, why SEOmoz as a huge list of paid directorys? Is SEOmoz outdate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PedroM1 -
Someone COPIED my entire site on Google- what should I do?
I purchased a very high ranked and old site a year or so ago. Now it appears that the people I purchased from completely copied the site all graphics and content. They have now built that site up high in rankings and I dont want it to compromise my site. These sites look like mirror images of each other What can I do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TBKO0 -
Should We Pull The Plug On This Site?
I am helping a retailer out with their site. They were hit hard with the Penguin update, and traffic has dropped by about 75%. Here are the stats: It is fairly new, has been up for about 3 years. Has partial match domain name Is nearly fully indexed with over 4K pages Has NOT received an unnatural link message from Google, so no manual penalty. Has had most keywords BURIED in the search results. Link profile: Has done about 50-100 blog comments, 500 directory submissions, 800 social bookmarks, 5-6 press releases, 300 article submissions (most removed), about 30-50 guest blog posts. I am thinking it may have just been hit because of aggressive use of anchor text as opposed to massive spamming. Then again, the site has never really added great content and the product pages have no unique content. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo1 -
I've done some link building on my website... why is google showing this?
Hi guys, it seems Google is going crazy as always, basically sometimes i'm ranked first page sometimes i'm not there, not sure if it's because of my link building and Google is indexing the links. At the moment in IE i'm top 3-4 for this keyword however the Title tag is not what I set it to be it's basically taking the product name then adding something after it. (I know google sometimes changes to what they want if they feel its more relevant but it isn't in this case) Not sure if this is normal for my keyword to keep appearing then dissapearing in Google. I noticed in FF my keyword isn't there but in IE it is. I've logged out of my Google account deleted all history/cookies etc. Even checked on my friends computer. Hope this makes sense and i'm not going crazy!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | InkCartridgesFast0 -
Can our white hat links get a bad rap when they're alongside junk links busted by Panda?
My firm has been creating content for a client for years - video, blog posts and other references. This client's web vendor has been using bad links and link farms to bolster rank for key phrases - successfully. Until last week when Google slapped them. They have been officially warned on WMT for possibly using artificial or unnatural links to build PageRank. They went from page one of the most popular term in Chicago for their industry where they had been for over a year - to page 8 - overnight. Other less generic terms that we were working on felt the sting as well. I was aware of and had warned the client of the possibility of repercussions from these black hat tactics (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-google-makes-liars-out-of-the-good-guys-in-seo#jtc170969), but didn't go as far as to recommend they abandon them. Now I'm wondering if one of our legitimate sites (YoChicago.com), which has more than its share of the links into the client site is being considered a bad link. All of our links are legitimate, i.e., anchor text equals description of destination, video links describe the entity that is linked to. Our we vulnerable? Any insight would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mikescotty0 -
Retail Site and Internal Linking Best Practices
I am in the process of recreating my company's website and, in addition to the normal retail pages, we are adding a "learn" section with user manuals, reviews, manufacturer info, etc. etc. It's going to be a lot of content and there will be linking to these "learn" pages from both products and other "learn" pages. I read on a SEOmoz blog post that too much internal linking with optimized anchor text can trigger down-rankings from Google as a penalty. Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does. And I figured they would all have optimized text because I think that is usually best for the end user (I personally like to know that I am clicking on "A Review of the Samsung XRK1234" rather than just "A Review of Televisions"). What is best practice for this? Is there a suggested limit to the number of links or how many of them should have optimized text for a retail site with thousands of products? Any help is greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Marketing.SCG0