Linking to bad sites
-
Hi,
I just have a quick question. Is it very negative to link to "bad" sites, such as online pharmacies, dating, adult sites, that sort of stuff? How much does linking to a "bad" site negatively affect a "good" site?
Thank you.
-
Anytime, feel free to fire me a private message or add me on Skype. Im always available to offer advice if I can
-
Hi Istvan,
Thank you for the great reply. I understand now.
All best,
- Sal
-
Thank you Matt!
-
Matt, thanks for the credits!
double thumbs up on your statement regarding link building: "remember that link building is always about quality, not quantity."
Gr.,
Istvan
-
Great comment. I would like to reiterate this point.
You cannot control who links to you - this provides you with a safety net but does not make you invincible. You should be OK if there are one or two links which come from spammy sites (obviously if you have 2,000,000 links then you could get away with more than one or two bad links). The issue would come around if you have lots of spammy links or the ratio of spammy links to good links is too high.
As Istvan mentioned, be careful who you link to.
It is more important however to not blast links at your site. If you get too many links in a short space of time then this looks dodgy to Google.
Also remember that link building is always about quality, not quantity.
-
Hi Salvyy,
I always told my team, that if we gain links from bad websites, that is in a some way harmful, BUT pointing out to such sites can flag us. (The same is told by Matt Cutts who pointed out that you cannot influence who is linking to you, but you can choose where to link to).
Therefore my advice would be, if it is not in your niche then don't link to these sites.
Gr.,
Istvan
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
-
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Linking and non-linking root domains
Hi, Is there any affect on SEO based on the ratio of linking root domains to non-linking root domains and if so what is the affect? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Unnatural Links From My Site Penalty - Where, exactly?
So I was just surprised by officially being one of the very few to be hit with the manual penalty from Google "unnatural links from your site." We run a clean ship or try to. Of all the possible penalties, this is the one most unlikely by far to occur. Well, it explains some issues we've had that have been impossible to overcome. We don't have a link exchange. Our entire directory has been deindexed from Google for almost 2 years because of Panda/Penguin - just to be 100% sure this didn't happen. We removed even links that went even to my own personal websites - which were a literal handful. We have 3 partners - who have nofollow links and are listed on a single page. So I'm wondering... does anyone have any reason to understand why we'd have this penalty and it would linger for such a long period of time? If you want to see strange things, try to look up our page rank on virtually any page, especially in the /gui de/ directory. Now the bizarre results of many months make sense. Hopefully one of my fellow SEOs with a fresh pair of eyes can take a look at this one. http://legal.nu/kc68
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoagnostic0 -
How should I react to my site being "attacked" by bad links?
Hello, We have never bought links or done manipulative linbuilding. Meanwhile, someone has recently (15th of March) pointed at the top 5 websites on my main keyword with lots of bad quality links. So far it has not affected my rankings at all. Actually, I think it will not affect them because I think it was not a massive enough attack. The particular page that has been attacked had about 100 root domains pointing it and now it went up to something like 400. All those were in one day. All of those links use the same anchor text: the keyword we're ranking for. With those extra 300 root domains pointing at us, we went from 600 rootdomain to 900 pointing at our domain as a whole. The page that was targetted by the attack is not the homepage. What I wanted to do was to basically do nothing since I think it won't affect our rankings in any ways but I wanted you guys' opinion. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Is removing inorganic links a bad idea?
Hey there, We have recently been in touch with a SEO agency that recomended we remove all inorganic links from our backlink profile. Most of the links are pretty good but there are some news sites that have sitewide links to our site. The link is in the nav menu, as a useful link. We didn't ask for this link it was totally organic. Also some link building in the past was focused on anchor text so some of the keywords may have been over emphasised. Is it a good idea to go about removing all of the potentially inorganic looking links? My concern is that we wipe out links that google are actually valuing. I still know sites are ranking #1 with much more dubious backlink profiles, and then there's this guy who removed his sitewide backlinks and dropped in his ranking: http://www.seomoz.org/q/removed-site-wide-links If a competitor decided to add negative links to our site, it would take longer to find and remove negative links than it would for them to add them. It seems odd that google would allow negative SEO to be that easy.. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timscullin0 -
Are sites that recently lost traffic considered bad neighborhood?
Hi, While searching for co-operations and guest blogging opportunities I found several sites that look legit and that lost all SE traffic (according to various tools such as SEMRush). By legit I mean sites that have PR3 and up. Have many solid looking articles and that the articles are on the site's subject and that the articles do not necessarily point to other sites with exact match anchors. Should I post in these sites or are they probably penalized and therefore being there put me at risk? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Should I change site link structure? Will that make things worse?
I've got an Exact Match Domain that has just started to do well in Google for say the past year. I've always received good rankings from Bing and Yahoo but I love the traffic levels that Google sends. Long story short on the 25th according to webmaster tools, my impressions on their search engine have been destroyed. No problems, not de-indexed, just not showing my site anymore. I like this site and have been careful, built some links and the anchor text is suspect but also not suspect because its the same as the domain. What I feel the problem may be is the site structure. I set it up a long time ago like this: Exact-Match-keyword. com/ Exact-match-keyword.php/state I thought it looked kinda spammy at the time but also thought it may help. Now I'm wondering if I shorten all the page titles to the state name and 301 the old links if I will regain rankings, or if I may lose some from other search engines. I used to think Penguins were cute......
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TEGS1