Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
-
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run.
To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt?
Thanks for your time and insight,
Ruben
-
Sounds good! Thanks for the help.
-
Hi Ruben,
If we get all technical you could argue that a quantity of sites pointed towards you could be seen as bad but lets look at this another way.
Lets say you had a coffee shop and several completely unrelated blogs post a link to your site because they like your coffee, the sites them selves have nothing to do with coffee but the link is still good because its telling Google that clearly you are a good coffee shop. Hopefully my bad Analogy will shed some light on it.
You could fret over all links pointed and over optimize your site,Don't look at back links as something that will make or break your site
first thing you always put the user first and if it makes sense for the user the rest will fall in to placeShort answer - No
Best of luck and I hope my answer helps.
-
Just get those links. Consider it as a way to diversify your current link portfolio. Wouldn't that actually be natural looking vs everything being within the same niche? Plus those links are one of a kind so just don't worry about it.
If you really can't help but worry, ask for Brand/URL anchor texts with a "long-enough" description. You'll be fine
-
they are totally fine.
The link will be hosted on a page where features other businesses that they also did the same thing as you did. they are relevant from a "local" theme perspective.
don't over think it
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
-
A semi client of mine reached out to me recently that another site scraped his whole site and traffic dropped significantly.
Someone that reaches out to me on occasion for help but is mostly an SEO DIYer recently had his site copied completely and his traffic dropped significantly immediately after. I have never had a client experience this in the past. Does anyone have suggestions or expertise on this? See his question and what he has done below. Jeremy This site scraped my credit site. Its appearance coincides with a dramatic sitewide decrease in Google traffic.I submitted a takedown request by paying this company $200. No results yet. My hosting company also placed blocks on the site HTML which pings my server for CSS and picture files. My Google Webmaster tools account shows inbound links coming from the copycat. Is there something more I should be doing? Copy Site: http://masqueros.com/Real Site: https://www.savvyoncredit.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Help with ranking
Hi Board users! I have a site that I don't understand why its not ranking. Its called JohnnyJet.com It has great domain authority and plenty of links. Looking at google webmaster tools I don't think there is a penalty. I have not done black hat stuff, so I am puzzled. I have a subdomain that stores some of my old content (some of it is duplicate) http://vintage.johnnyjet.com/home.asp The site has been around for ever, and I need help with a site audit to see what it is that I am missing. I know my long tail should rank much better. 2 questions: 1. Can you guys (board members) send me any insights if you take a peek 2. Can you tell me where to go to get an in-depth audit on my site -- I need a deep dive to get to the bottom of this 🙂 Thanks all!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | coolhand19800 -
Clean-up Question after a wordpress site Hack added pages with external links from a massive link wheel?
Hey All, Thought I would throw this out to ensure I am dotting my "i's" and crossing my "t's"..... Client WordPress site was hacked injected 3-4 pages that cross linked to hundreds (affiliate junk spam link wheel). Pages were removed, 3rd party cleared all malware/viruses. Heavy duty firewall and security monitoring are in place. Hacked pages are now showing as 404. No penalties, ranking issues....If anything there was a temporary BOOST in rankings due to the large link-wheel type net that the pages were receiving....That has since leveled out rankings. I guess my question is, in your opinion is it best to let those pages 404, I am noticing a large amount of links going to them from all over the world from this large link net that was built. I find the temptation to 301 re-direct deleted pages to the homepage difficult...lol..{the temptation is REAL}. Is there anything I am missing? Any other steps that YOU would take? I am assuming letting those pages 404 would be the best bet, as in time they will roll off index.... Thank you in advance, I appreciate any feedback or opinions....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Anthony_Howard0 -
Links Identified in WMT not on Webpages
Hi, We're currently reviewing one of our clients backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic & OSE as we can see many toxic links. However we cannot find the links on the webpages that are listed on Google WMT. We have searched through the website along with checking through the source code. Should we still disavow the domain? Thanks, Edd
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tomcraig860 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Being Link Attacked - Should I worry?
Hey, Hope everyone is well. Just a quick question. I hope to get an answer from Google officially (I've asked in their webmaster forums area) but any experience or opinions from the community here would be great. I noticed recently that our site started to get thousands of links from comments in random blogs from all across the web. This is nothing to do with us as we don't "build links". I can only assume it is a competitor trying to get our site hit by the algorithm for a particular search term, as all the anchor text (I estimate about 1,800 links with this anchor text) point to one page on our site that is ranking for that term. I recently removed the website from webmaster tools and re added, due to an unrelated issue about the a video rich snippet not updating, and all the links have just popped up today on there. Is this something I need to worry about? and should I start collecting all these domains and using the disavow tool to block the whole domain of these sites with the comments (some of them seem like genuine sites). There seem to be new ones everyday and it looks to be an ongoing attack as well. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JonathanRolande0 -
Setting up a Blog for more inbound links
Site A is my Main Site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CLTMichael
Site B is my Blog. Is using site B to link back to site A a good idea or should site A have it's own blog going after keywords?1 -
Are unusual chinese links likely to be black hat?
Hello, I noticed that this onepage website: http://www.clearpixel.net/ ranks at #11 for web design London so I did some research using SEO Moz Pro. Turns out that alll their links are from Chinese directory style sites. Does this demonstrate black hat SEO? If not, how do I go about getting links on Chinese sites with .gov urls. Many thanks, Martin Hofschroer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinHof0