Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
-
I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar.
Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to?
Thanks,
Mark
-
I would not unless your site is about gabling or casinos as stated. I would not link out to non-relevant content.
-
Hi Mark,
I'll try to be ast straightforward as possible and say that the practice of buying/selling links with the intent of passing link value (a.k.a. pagerank, linkjuice) is against Google's quality guidelines.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
Unfortunately this is not uncommon, but there are some things you can negotiate that are within Google's quality guidelines.
If they want to purchase a link, it should be considered as advertising. If it is considered advertising, you should abide by Google's guidelines and add the "nofollow" tag to the link which essentially does not give the link any value. The only value is potential traffic from your site for the buyer(s).
Most likely, the buyer(s) will not agree to this as they are probably buying a followed link in order to pass pagerank from your site to theirs - in order to manipulate search rankings.
Would I do it? Nope, not worth the risk. However, I would be more favourable to link to them if they advertised with me. I would only link to them if they had relevant, related and good quality content that I genuinely wanted to refer my visitors to.
I'm guessing you're not a casino site, so you might want to steer clear from this transaction.
Regarding your second question:
Linking to "bad neighborhood" or poor quality sites can also affect your rankings - this is a known fact. Have a good look at their site:
- Is it a link farm
- Poor content, tons of ads/adsense
- Questionable material (adult etc..)
- Malware, spyware
- Thin affiliate site
- Do they have business contact details clearly visible
- Is it easy to contact them
- Is the content on their site being scraped from another
I think you get the picture, definitely have a read of what Rand said a few years ago:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/more-on-nofollow-at-seomoz-and-how-bad-outbounds-can-impact-websites
That post is still very relevant and sums up the point quite nicely.
Be cautious and good luck.
Cheers,
Dave
-
Yes, it might potentially harm you. And I believe that once you link to a gambiling/casino site, less people will be willing to get links from you again as some don't want to be associated to gambling/casino sites (bad neighbourhood).
-
-
Never admit to thinking about selling links
-
Working in gambling, I've seen a lot of paid for links to gambling sites burn the pages they're on if it's from unrelated content (sigh, I shouldn't be honest, just going to make my job harder). Usually this'll just burn the PR of the page it's on, but sometimes can do damage to your whole site.
-
In the interests of disclosure (and as mentioned above) I would technically be a competitor working in the same sector, but if I approach you for links you should probably turn me down too
-
If you page is about casinos or slots or games or probabilities or something related then you might consider giving them a link, but again, don't admit to selling them, especially in a public forum. Linking out to relevant content isn't as bad (paid is still bad). If it's a body building site though (just going by your user name) I wouldn't.
-
If it was an advertising link you would have to nofollow it to adhere to Google guidelines, however I doubt the person wanting to buy it would agree.
-
And yes adding any extra links slightly reduces the value of the links you already have.
-
-
My site is fitness/health/sports related if that makes any difference.
I understand your point about link dilution, but thats not what I mean, will it harm the rankings of my site or the sites that my site links out to?
-
Well if you're site is about casinos and gambling that can even be useful for you - it can help as google said that linking out to similar content can even help your ranking by showing users quality similar content.
If not for sure it won't help and more then that it can even harm you.
if you post the link in the footer of the page for example it won't even help them and more then that it can hurt you as they can smell a paid links in many ways.As for the other links of the page, a new link will dilute the link juice. (10 links out -> link juice / 10 for each one, adding a new one will mean link juice / 11 - even if y ou use no follow for one or more links)
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 Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Back links issue and how to resolve it
Hi there! We have a client who has been generating back links from external sites over a period of two years with all the same anchor text which all link back to the home page. This anchor text is also their main search phrase they wish to score highly on. In total, they have roughly 300 domain names linking to their site. Over 50 of these domain names all have the same anchor text. These links have been generated through articles and blogs. So roughly 20% of the total number of links all have the same anchor text. Over the past 6 months the client has noticed a steady drop in their rankings for this term. From the back link analysis we have done, we believe it is this which is causing the problem. Does any one else agree? For the remedy, do we go in and see if we can change the anchor text or disavow them through Google webmaster tools? Suggestions? Thanks for your help! P 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Globalgraphics0 -
How do I know for sure if my site has been slapped?
I'm new to this SEO business - and I focus on inbound marketing. My client's site is www.SubconsciousMind.com. Just a few weeks ago it was showing in the top search results for several major keywords. Now, it has disappeared all together and there are competitors showing that have very little SEO (metatarsi not set up properly, etc.). So, I know there has to be an opportunity. Some obvious things:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SoundsLikeJoy
There aren't a lot of links and the majority seem to be bad (bad linking farms)
Social media is set up by a robot
Articles are poorly written obviously ONLY for SEO My client hired a SEO company awhile back to get results, not understanding black hat / white hat and it worked for several years. Now - it is really hurting her. The sites she is linking to doesn't have any contact info to get the "unlinked." I've read I can use the disavow tool. I asked her if she got anything from Google about "being slapped". She doesn't even receive the emails to her site because she trusted someone else to set it all up. Should I rebuild from scratch? Any recommendations? We are funning adwords now as a quick fix.0 -
Site being targeted by hardcore porn links
We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic. I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking. I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern. The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code. Has anyone else seen this before? Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it? All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance. MB.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Are these links bad for my results?
In the past we have requested links on multiple directories. Since we have seen a mayor drop (60% in traffic) in results around the pinquin update 24-26th of April. Our results have been slowly getting lower and lower in Google. Is it possible to tell if these links are in fact doing my site harm? Before the 26th of April it was easy to see that the results where benefiting from the submission to those directories. We did not have any messages in webmaster tools and reconsideration says "no manual spam action taken". What would be the best strategy to turn this around and go up again? A selection of the requested links can be found below. <colgroup><col width="266"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 2Hillz
| www.thesquat.org |
| www.directmylink.com |
| www.thegreatdirectory.org |
| www.submission4u.com |
| www.urlmoz.com |
| www.basoti.org |
| www.iwebdirectory.co.uk |
| www.freeinternetwebdirectory.com |
| addsite-submitfree.com |
| opendirectorys.com |
| www.xennobb.com |
| mdwerks.com |
| www.directoryfire.com |
| www.rssbuffet.com | To give a good view on the problem: The requested links anchors are mostly not in the native language of the directories. Thanks!0 -
What's the best way to set up 301's from an old off-site subdomain to a new off-site subdomain?
We are moving our Online store to a new service and we need to create 301's for all of the old product URLs. Being that the old store was hosted off-site, what is the best way to handle the 301 re-directs? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VermilionDesignInteractive0 -
What do Bing and Yahoo look for in a site?
Do Bing and Yahoo look for authoritative sites like google does? Do they punish sites for black hat or spamming? The reason I ask these questions is because one of my competitors was ranking in first place for many great keywords in Google, they have the highest authority out of all of their competitors. They must have been punished by Google because now they are not ranking for any great keywords in Google. However they are ranking 1st in Bing and Yahoo for most the top keywords, getting the the most visibility out of all the sites. I attached a small Graph with latest visibility for the sites with the top keywords from google and then I also included the company that was punished from google they are the green circles on the graph. dIVI4.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Do Friends Let Friends Sell Links?
I have a friend with a site that has a lot of content. Some of that content has affiliate links with no follows to affiliate urls. Those pages also have a disclosure on them about the affiliate relationship. Now, he's talking about taking some of the existing under-performing affiliate links and renting them out to another site that wants them for the link juice. He says he'd have an on-page disclosure, a display ad for the advertiser on the page and something in the text like "you might check out our advertiser..." and then some keyword targeted link. He was asking me how risky I thought this is for him and really I don't know.Do you think Google would find this and s**t a chicken over it? I really don't know, given that I see really blatant undisclosed rented links all the time.Of course, my easy answer to him is "don't do it," but it does make me wonder how risky that is. Also, is that a realistic site-wide penalty kind of thing or it just doesn't pass any link juice to the advertiser kind of thing? So, I'm posting here for others to weigh in on. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010