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Having a link from a foreign site
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I just ran an OSE on a competitor of ours that they have a few links from this website, http://www.tz-online.de/ would this not damage there site?
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You should be ok. if the site is in anyway relevant, it does not matter that it is in a different location.
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If you had 1000 links coming from a russian porn site, then you may get penalised as it doesn't appear to be a natural link profile.
However one or two links from foreign sites is not a bad thing. If your site is being discussed/linked too in other countries then it should be a sign that its good if not great!
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Nope.
Google won't penalise a site because of links pointing to it. A webmaster has little to no control over inbound links and so your competitor can't be held responsible for random german sites linking to it.
In general I believe local links > foreign links, but all things equal there's nothing wrong with links from other countries.
Worst case scenario Google can devalue spammy links, but they won't remove a site from their index simply because a lot of spammy websites are pointing to it.
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