Can linking out to a weak site harm my sites SEO?
-
We have an affiliate that wants us to link to his site to help him get started. His website looks okay and is in the same niche as us. However, he has PR 0 and no Page Trust.
We could work in a natural looking link in a news article, but there is no way he could be considered any kind of "authority" link. Can linking to his site harm us?
-
just nofollow it and then you can link to any site you want without worrying about anything. Link anywhere you want and it won't harm your site if it's nofollowed.
-
Great answers here already. All I'd like to add is: If the Search Engines did not exist / SEO did not exist ? Would you still link to them ? Are you going to be leading traffic to them ? Do you want to do that ?
I totally understand why the affiliate wants it. The question is, would you want to do it ?
-
I would have no problem making this link. I never look at a site's PR to decide whether or not I want to link to it.
Here are two things that might make me consider my decision:
1. If it was a site that I would not want to be visiting in front of my mom then I'd likely not link to it. (i.e. porn, gambling, buy viagra, etc.)
2. If this was becoming a pattern then I would be concerned. What I mean by that is that you need to be careful that your site doesn't become a glorified article network that exists just to link to other sites.
-
Linking to low quality sites is obviously harmful but a website with 0 PR is not considered to be low quality or weak website.
I think if the website is within your niche and you really think that this website is going to grow and attain lot of natural links in the near future… I think you surly should link to that website!
The only reason you should avoid linking to that website is because the current link profile is bad (i.e: links coming from porn or different spammed websites)
Hope this helps!
-
Linking to low quality sites can harm your site, especially if they are considered "bad neighborhood" sites such as porn, pills, and casinos.
That being said, if you think this site is of high quality and believe they will eventually grow in domain authority, by all means link to them. Every site has to start somewhere. Just be aware that Google judges the character of your site by the sites that you associate with, so choose who you link to wisely.
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
-
SEO Implications For a Technical Functionality Fix
Our Magento based affiliate extension is not working, due to a conflict with the Varnish caching system. Varnish has a known bug which does not allow multiple cookies to be set. Our workaround involves redirecting any request with the affiliate tracking parameter to the HTTPS version of the site. Varnish does not run on HTTPs and therefore our affiliate cookie will be set. Note: the main content of our site runs on HTTP. My SEO concern is how to handle this for the search engines. We have a few things to consider: Redirect: Should we use a 301 or 302? Canonical: It seems to make sense to include a canonical on the HTTP version of the site without the affiliate tracking parameter - right? Robots Meta Tags: "noindex, follow" or "index, follow" Am I missing something? Thanks for your time and consideration!
Affiliate Marketing | | 19prince0 -
International Re-sellers Scrapping My Site Should I be Worried?
We are a USA based company and we only sell direct to the US and Canada. However, we have partnered with other companies that are now distributing our products in other places like Australia and Mexico for example. These partners have scrapped our site and have used large chunks of our content to create a website for themselves on their intentional domains (ex.. .au and .mx). How concerned should I be about this? Should I reach out to them and require that they use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or request the to stop? I have never had to deal with international SEO issues before, so any advice and direction would be appreciated!
Affiliate Marketing | | ChadC0 -
Affiliate program links
Hello, I've question regarding affiliate partner generated links.Company www.example.com has a affiliate program. Partner www.example2.com links to the company site with affiliate link www.example.com/?affid=xxxx in banner, article etc. As I understand these type of links could hurt our Company site, so I asked partners to use rel="nofollow" in all links where they link to us usign ?affid=xxxx in url. To be 100% sure that I did the right thing I decided to post here my question. Could these type of links hurt our Company site? Regards,
Affiliate Marketing | | juris_l
Juris0 -
Where can I find best resources for Affiliate Marketing?
Any suggestion for Affiliate training, forums, seminars, etc. for newbie? I'm doing my research but would like to hear from pros. I'm experienced web developer and Adsense publisher, now want to step in the world of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing | | webplex0 -
'legitimate' link wheels
I was wondering what SEOMoz' thoughts are on the mega legitimate link wheel sites that are out there. TechMediaNet have been buying up massive news/media sites which arent really monetised (adsense) like http://www.space.com/ http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/ livescience.com and others and generating, admittedly good quality, curated content. Then seeding them with content with backlinks to their money site, toptenreviews.com which in essence is a review site with thousands of pages loaded with affiliate links no better than any of the other site out there. e.g. http://www.livescience.com/9755-bing.html due to the scale of what they're doing pretty much any keyword search i do with review in it (the last thing i wanted to purchase was a usb 3 hub) ends up with toptenreviews.com dominating the serps presumably due to the high PR the viral nature of the media sites are working with. Do you think Google will crack down on this, or do you think it's capitalism in action? TechMediaNet have invested millions in this project and just gotten another $33 million in funding recently.....
Affiliate Marketing | | idimmu0 -
How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?
hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?
Affiliate Marketing | | zeepartner0 -
Duplicate versions of pages on my site are getting indexed by Google...I think...
Hello, Our site has a very high bounce rate, which in part is down to a slightly old fashioned design, and also because we are a retailer and I imagine many visitors are simply quickly comparing prices and then leaving. However, having had a look in Google Analytics, I think that there is another issue that is contributing to a very high bounce rate. When I look in Content > Top Content, and order the pages in order of Bounce Rate, high to low, there are hundreds of instances of pages with just one or two visits in the last month, and a 100% bounce rate. The links are the same as our home page or pages on our website, but with extra letters and numbers at the end of the url. We have an affiliate scheme, which provides our affiliates with unique codes for the products they want to link to, and my guess is that these urls are getting indexed. I've looked at a few other links, and they go to translated versions of a page from our website, generated by Google. Other urls seem to have been generated by search results from our own search on the website. What worries me is that there are lots and lots of versions of the same page, with slightly different urls. I am by no means an SEO expert - I work for a very small company and am basically learning as I go - but I know that duplicate content is bad news. If the pages were on our own site, we could use 301s to redirect, but what about translated versions, or urls generated by affiliate schemes, or search results? Many thanks, Sophy
Affiliate Marketing | | sophycolbert0 -
Traffic down on site on regular intervals
Hi, We are running a sort of large affiliate website, with having 2000 web pages. We are having unique content, metas and related on every page. The problem we are facing is we are not gaining traffic constantly. We have some top rankings for sometimes few days, for few weeks and for few months. But suddenly we went few pages behind on serps, we loose all our ranking. After some time it will come again on serps as natural positions. Due to this after year of hard work on content, meta and many more small small issues, we are on the same no. of visitors. Given below are the my site traffic details with attached image. We used SEOMOZ Pro tools to evaluate all the possibilities and errors we are doing, We found lots of bad things happening our site, We started work them on since early January and which achieved the corrections as per the image of crawl diagnosis summary page shown below : we are not having sitemap on our site and having some soft 404s, but we are working towards it. Is there any thing more specific we can do to this kind of problem.. 5AyHO.png yxkEr.png
Affiliate Marketing | | semshah1430