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
-
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
About link building in 2015?
I don't think we still can use the same link buildings tools of years ago. So, how relevant is this article (from 2009):
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nans
http://moz.com/blog/17-ways-search-engines-judge-the-value-of-a-link Or is there any update? Nancy1 -
How to gain links to this site
Hello, How would you suggest I gain backlinks for bobweikel.com in light of all present and future Google updates? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Disavow links leading to 404
Looking at the link profile anchor text of a site i'm working on new links keep popping up in the reports with let's say very distasteful anchor text. These links are obviously spam and link to old forum pages for the site that doesn't exist any more, so the majority seem to trigger the 404 page. I understand that the 404 page (404 header response) does not flow any link power, or damage, but given the nature and volume of the sites linking to the "domain" would it be a good idea to completely disassociate and disavow these domains?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Links and how they count?
We managed to get ourselves out of a penalty 6 months ago and 100 days later after the message of penalty removable we finally felt that we were moving back on track (not a lot of movement before and 50% down due to links being taken away), we have around 120 really high quality links but 95% of them are urls or the business name. Anyway we still have a couple of pages that I feel are fairly down on rankings and most of the links as mentioned above are high quality but they are either anchor text of the website name or url my main question is that when looking at my competitors I see that they have the same or less links and from much less powerful places (most I would not touch) but they seem to have a ratio of 5 - 10 % of the links are the keywords they are trying to rank for. My question is if you have 50 links from better places but they are unrelated terms such as the web site name or just urls and you have 50 links from average places but 5 - 10% are on related terms to what you are trying to rank for which ones would win out.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
More than one site in same industry
A client wants to have 3 sites in the same industry with a lot of overlapping keywords. Is that white hat? Will Google mind?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Feedback on link building idea
We came up with this idea at work for a client but before I initiate it I was wanting to get feedback on if this would be considered whitehat and alright to use. It is for an ecommerce site. On the order confirmation and thank you page (not email cause they are on some old system that does not send out emails) we are wanting to put a thank you for your order message and continue with a statement about how they can save money on future purchases with a link that takes them to a page with info on how to do so. That new page will have info about linking to the site from a blog or website. And will say if you link back to us and send us an email with that link as proof we will give you a promo code for your next purchase. Is this alright?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | webfeatseo0 -
Auto-link inside your own site to the same domain is white-hat?
Hi, I am using a plugin in wordpress that make auto link for some certain keywords in my site suppose: My site is example.com My important keyword is: sample and across the domain example.com through out the content if there is the word: sample it is linked automatically to example.com I like your opinion about this practice, if it may carry any kind of punishment by SEs? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Pooria0