Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value
-
Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value. By this I mean, if you do have links from link farms and bad neighbourhoods, would it effectively pull you down in search engine rankings. Or is it more that it's just a waste of time to get these links, as it adds no value to your ranking.
Are google saying avoid them because it will not have a positive effect, or avoid them becuase it will have a negative effect.
I am under the opinion that it will not harm, but it will not help either. I think this because at the end of the day you are not 100% in control of your inbound links, any bad site could add you and if a competitor, god forbid, wanted to play some black hat games, couldn't they just add you to thousands of bad sites to pull your ranking down?
Interested to hear your opinions on the matter, or any "facts" if they are out there.
-
I have thought about this, it would not be too many companies that would do this, one there is a cost in doing so if you are a small company, also there is a huge risk if caught doing so, I am sure that the costs of getting caught would be huge.
-
it is really interesting what happens if a competitor starts a bad PR or such a bad links campaign. Large numbers of bad links from totally irrelevant websites. How does google prevent that? Any ideas on that topic?
-
I have a friend in the SEO community and he tried getting some bulk links for his site and it did more than good. When testing this strategy he saw his site drop from the first page of google to the fourth page. It took him nearly half a year to get his site back on page one of google.
If you are worried about competitors adding bad links to your site than I think the best strategy is to get the best natural back links to combat the bad ones.
-
You must of missed it, bing also can hurt you for bad links. look for the word hurt
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/31/link-farms-and-like-farms-don-t-be-tempted.aspx -
yea but the big difference is bing does not penalize sites for bad links google does and getting knocked out of google is majorly crippling to a website due to their search engine dominance.
bad links can definitely take a site down in google. always keep an eye on your incoming links to make sure competition isn't doing any harmfiul linking to your site, and always concentrate on getting good clean links yourself to strengthen your site making it harder for bad links to affect you.
-
Here is a article from bing on the subject
-
There is a ton of information available concerning this topic. I would recommend using the Search function to find information.
In short, bad links can harm a site. The question is how many of a site's inbound links are harmful. If you have a site with 100 links and 90 of them are bad, then you have a problem. If you have a site with 10k links and 1k are bad, you are fine. You want a good overall link profile.
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
-
Can affiliate links affect DA?
Hey guys, over the past two months my DA has gone down from 17 to 12, and I have no dura what could have caused it. I started putting in some Amazon affiliate links in my posts - could that be the reason why? Also, I have about 30 backlinks from a blog with a spam score of 11% - could this also be affecting it in any way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmyAed0 -
"Google chose different canonical than user" Issue Can Anyone help?
Our site https://www.travelyaari.com/ , some page are showing this error ("Google chose different canonical than user") on google webmasters. status message "Excluded from search results". Affected on our route page urls mainly. https://www.travelyaari.com/popular-routes-listing Our canonical tags are fine, rel alternate tags are fine. Can anyone help us regarding why it is happening?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA0 -
My website is coming up under a proxy server "HideMyAss.com." How do I stop this from happening?
We've noticed that when we search our web copy in Google the first result is under a proxy server "HideMyAss.com," and our actual website is no where in sight. We've called Google and they really didn't have an answer for us (well the 2-3 people) we spoke with. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AAC_Adam0 -
Is it still considered reciprocal linking if one of the links has a nofollow tag?
I have a popular website in which I include nofollow links to many local businesses, like restaurants and retailers. Many of the businesses are local startups that are more focused on word of mouth and often have no idea what SEO is. Seeing as I am already mentioning them on my website and my readers are finding them via the links, I want to reach out to these businesses to see me if they might give me a link since I have been linking to them for years. My question is: If these business owners decide to link to my wesbite and they give me a 'followed' link, will this look like reciprocal linking in the eyes of search engines? In other words, does the nofollow tag I put on my links to other businesses negate the reciprocal link penalty since both parties are not benefiting from a link juice exchange?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrewHill0 -
Forum Ping Back Links
Hi all, This will probably be a fairly simple question, however I'm unsure of the correct terminology to get a good answer via search. Some of my competitors have links in the comment section of highly respected websites, example of one occurrence on the mighty Wired: http://www.wired.com/bodyhack/2007/07/good-green/ Since Panda and Penguin I know Google has attempted to disregard any sort of link juice from such comment/forum spam - is this the case with comment links in sites such as Wired, as above? I'd like to hear that such comment spam actually harms the ranking of competitor sites..is there any truth to this also? I want to avoid all sorts of spammy approaches to SEO such as this - I've always been an ethical marketer, and would rather not stoop to these levels...but if they work and there is no chance of ranking penalisation.. Thanks for your time, dudes!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | paj19790 -
Link Building Plan Need some tips
Okay so I want to start focusing on SEO for my Web design company and I have been reading and reading and am now working on my off-page optimization and have some questions. My words are competitive words and a few of them are finally increasing to top 500 and a few in top 100. My current MozRank for my domain is 2.28, but my mozbar shows my homepage to be MozRank to be 3.35 Link Building Plan -Around 50 Directory submissions to high PR directories and high MozRank domains Free listings Paid Listings -3-5 articles written for guest posts Around 25 Local Business directories such as brownbook.net, whitepages, etc -Around 20 dofollow forum profile creation and backlinks from signatures -Squidioo Lens Creation( I will be creating high quality content related my website which would be web design, internet marketing, seo services.) -Hubpages Creation My question is should the content used on squidioo be 100% original, like can I post the content to other directories as well? -Article Directories Okay so from what I've read this is method doesn't really give much benefit with the recent updates, is this true or should I still at least submit some articles to article directories. I am also confused wouldn't distributing your articles to article directories be considered duplicate content? 20-25 Blog Comments on related blogs that support dofollow blog commenting, also will build some nofollow blog comment links for link diversity
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | azokaei0 -
When asking for links, what are good incentives to offer?
New to SEO and want to stay clean, What are white hat incentives you can offer in exchange for links? Giveaway for their readers? Give them helpful advice? Record video of me drinking a gallon of milk within 5 minutes?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 10JQKAs0 -
Why Does Massive Reciprocal Linking Still Work?
It seems pretty well-settled that massive reciprocal linking is not a very effective strategy, and in fact, may even lead to a penatly. However, I still see massive reciprocal linking (blog roll linking even massive resource page linking) still working all the time. I'm not looking to cast aspersion on any individual or company, but I work with legal websites and I see these strategies working almost universally. My question is why is this still working? Is it because most of the reciprocally linking sites are all legally relevant? Has Google just not "gotten around" to the legal sector (doubtful considering the money and volume of online legal segment)? I have posed this question at SEOmoz in the past and it was opined that massively linking blogs through blog rolls probably wouldn't send any flags to Google. So why is that it seems that everywhere I look, this strategy is basically dismissed as a complete waste of time if not harmful? How can there be such a discrepency between what leading SEOs agree to be "bad" and the simple fact that these strategies are working en masse over the period of at least 3 years?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Gyi0