Does anyone know the value of links coming from sites that are hip-deep in a penalty with Google? The site is PR5 but it doesn not do well in the search results for anything except for its own name. It's clearly penalized by Google for a long time, but the PR has been steady at PR5. (Actually, it might be more than PR5, and the PR might be suppressed due to the penalty, like fark.com (which is PR4 even though it should be 6-7).) Will the effect be negative, neutral, or positive? Note, the link is not a paid link, and there are no paid links on the penalized site. It's not immediately obvious why the site is in a penalty. People, don't speculate please, I need reliable info from someone who, say, had a link from high PR site, which suddenly got penalized - what happened to your site which was on the receiving end of the link? Instant death, uptick, no change?
having PR5 doesn't mean the site will do well is earch results. that doesn't mean that the site is penalized either. but if the site is tryly penalized, then i would stay away from such links
thats the clear answers I think. Also if you are sure the site is penalized then pls don't try to place your link on that even that is for free.
I would say.. If we are not sure about the result of getting/placing links at penalize site, then it would be better to stay away from it.. unless u r sure for positive result..
PR got nothing to do with ranking. But if the site still have its PR5, i believe it is not penalized.
By penalty, I assume you mean that you think the site has a -30, -60, or -90 SERP penalty on it. The problem is twofold. First, you don't really know what the live PR is. You can see from the toolbar that it has a pr5, but in fact, it may have already lost it's live/acutal PR. One thing you can check is Google backlinks. Are they still there? If the Google backlinks suddenly disappear, that's an indication that the sit emay soon take a PR hit, or lose it's PR altogether. Also, you can ask the owner to give you a snapshot of the Google Webmaster Central section entitle 'The PageRank of your pages in Google' under 'site diagnostics. This chart actually gives you are more current view of the PR than the toolbar (and all of the pagerank checkers) does. If it's currently a PR5, then it will have at least one colored block in the 'Medium' section. Second, you don't have a real good way to know for certain if the site is penalized. It could just be poorly optimized for the keywords you are searching for. For example, what if the site has duplicate title tags? It's a known fact that duplicate title tags can cause poor performance in SERPs even if the site has strong PR. Again, ask the owner to give you a snap shot of the 'Top search queries' section of google Webmaster Central, to give you an idea of the sites best performing keyphrases. Also, try www.semrush.com to analyze how well the sitees key phrases are performing. if the site doesn't have *any* keyprases in the top 30, then it's a goood indication it's been penalized. I hope this helps.
Having high Google PR does not mean that you can rank high in Google SERP ranking. Try to do a simple test on any random 10 keywords and check their respective top level domain PR and compare it with your opinion, I'm sure you will get this point clear.
I don't know why someone people on here bother to give answers if they don't know them themselves. First you can't get penalized from getting backlinks from penalized sites. Google has stated this and even Matt Cutts has stated this several times. Read his blog if your interested to see the do's and don'ts. If this did happen than all I had to do was buy PR storm or Xrumer to blacklist my competition. Google doesn't work this way. Another myth is how many backlinks can you get in a day. You can get thousands of backlinks and still won't get penalized. The only thing that will happen is that these links will be the same as no-follow. Basically they won't count. So why waste time on getting them. The second thing I read from up here is that someone said that PR doesn't effect rankings. Where did they here this from? Are you kidding me? Pr gives your site more authority. The higher PR you have the higher the chance you have of ranking for long tail keywords. Of course content plays a big role. But if you have two sites that have the keyword "how to get pagerank 5 within the next 5 months" once in the page, who do you think is going to rank higher in google. This is why sites like wikipedia, about.com, web md, and many others rank higher for keywords that are only mentions a few times. Now with this being said you shouldn't focus on getting PR. Building backlinks to get PR is consider bad in google's eyes. So this is what you should do: 1. Find a profitable niche. 2. Build a list of long tail keywords you should rank for. 3. Built content around these keywords. Now don't stuff your keywords to get better rankings. This is won't affect rankings so your just wasting your time. 3. Use the keyword in the header tags like h1,h2,h3 as well as the alt tags in images. You should use the keyword in url and don't focus on the domain. Like for instance www.domain.com/weight-loss-tips Also you should use the dash in between the keywords. This is automatically done in wordpress. All you need to do is change the permalink structure. Contact me if your not sure how to do this. 4. Link development. You should work on building backlinks to the actual articles instead of the main domain. Submit to article directories with 2 links to your site. One to your main domain and one to the article using the keyword as your anchor text. This should get you started on your way to building a successful business. If you need ideas or places to get backlinks or just any added information on what I said above feel free to contact me.
PR is not everything. but a site has pr5 or6 and it has lot of pages indexed then link from that site will certainly help your site. If the site is pr5 but the pages are not indexed then you can think that that site has been penalized by Google and the link from that site will not help.
GOOGLE has multiple level of penalized.It doesn't make any sense to me that i would avoid those sites linking back to me if it's related to my topic. The site believe to be penalized and has a PR which is not rank well is what? IT's part of the internet.And most probably they are better then you are(IF YOU ARE SEO SPAMMER).Good PR mean Google trust it as a legitmate trusted site.IT nothing to do with RANKING.The KEYWORD AUTHORITIES.
Think about it this way. If your competitor wanted to get you penalized, they just set up links from bad sites and BAM they win. Therefore, this cannot harm you. At worst the links would be no-follow. Also regarding PR, Matt has specifically said that pagerank affects SERPs.
Thanks for the responses guys. It's great that I'm getting some real thinking here. True, in most cases that would be an issue. But this one has survived several PR updates with PR intact - and it was under the penalty the whole time. Again, excellent info and advice how to deal with it from a pro, but I'm a pro too, so I can tell if a site is penalized or not. Not an issue in this case. It's only the effects that I'm concerned about. Speaking of which... Theoretically, in an ideal world. But I for one don't believe that at all. There is the bad neighborhood penalty. Google themselves warn about this. In other words, yes, you can get harmed by incoming links, no matter what Matt Cutts says. Matt Cutts doesn't provide hard evidence to back up what he says, anyway, and his viewpoint is subjective because he has an agenda: Google's agenda. I'm not saying he is always lying to make Google look good, but does he always tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? I don't think so. The only question is one of degree. Will one 'bad' link affect you? Or will it take a dozen? A hundred? A hundred bad links will definitely sink your site. The question is, what proportion of bad vs good links will harm your site? In this case, the available link is just one. I suppose I'm inclined to agree with those who say it won't harm the site. Still, a little risky. Then again, tempting; a full frontal PR5 - with no other links on the page - is a lot of juice. So that's why I wondered if anyone had experience in this regard. I was hoping someone had bought a penalized site with high PR or something. I suppose what I will do is, test it with a link to one of my lesser sites, a little blog or something, and see how it does. Maybe I'll test it with a link to someone else's site. Essentially true, but so totally irrelevant to this thread.
ok, so you know that they have a -30, -60, or -90 penalty, and you want to know if that waters down the link juice it passes along? In my experience, no. The SERP penalties do not affect the link juice they pass along. However, these penalties are supposed to serve as warnings to the webmasters that if they continue to break Google's terms and conditions, then they will lose their PageRank. So, I'd say it's important to try to figure out why they were penalized in the first place (perhaps archive.org would help with that), and then make sure that they have corrected the site and are no longer doing what they were penalized for. Even then, I think it's a risky proposition. You should receive full link juice for now, but the site is on this ice, and who know for how much longer it will keep it's PR.
Wow, you seem adamant about this. Hey you should build bad links to one of my sites. Or how about you try to sink your competition. You are not in charge of where your site links to. Because in google's eyes your not really should pose to be building links in the first place. You should get them from people who actually link to you. The only way you can answer this question is if you have been banned before because of this. There is no possible way google would banned a site because of off site factors. If this was the case hackers and spammers would just use this method to take down competition or enemies. They only way you will get banned is if your linking to a bad site. Answer this question. What is easy to do? Get backlinks or spam backlinks to your competition.
Yeah, I'm with proncios on this one. The only way I can see google penalizing you is if YOU linked to the 'bad neighborhood' website. Otherwise, it would be just too easy and too tempting to destroy your competition by creating really bad sites and then linking to them. Also, keep this in mind, are you using the google toolbar to figure out the PR? If this is truly a penalized site, the ACTUAL PR may not be PR5 ... it may very well turn to PR0 on the next google update.