For instance if I have hosting site, should I trade with programming site? Since it does not have hosting keywords, will it be same as if I traded hosting site with cooking site?
as far as i know,, it is not bad but it has no value if you trade links with other unrelated sites... just focus on getting quality and computer related links..
I would'nt waste my time. At best it won't help much, at worst you could end up with cooking sites listed as 'similar pages'.
if you are a webmaster of your site, why are you linking w/ not relevant to your site? in that way you may not get any inbound link w/ them otherwise Google discounting value of all not relevant links from you... Our goal is to get more relevant Inbound links.
Yes, but will google consider computer related site linking to hosting site better then cooking site linking to hosting site. First is much more relevant for humans, but google bots may not know that, cooking and programming would be same irrelevant to the bots ( Since neither programming site, nor cooking site does not have hosting as a keyword) So again my question is will cooking site linking to hosting site be same irrelevant then programming site linking tohosting site?
If it hurts, why do so many people have links to websites in their signatures that have nothing to do with webmaster forums?
Unrelated will still help you, and can help alot if it's a site with authority linking to you. People give a little too much credit to Google and the themed links situation. Example, a web design firm i worked for had virtually no links from other web design sites. They were links from sites created for customers ranging from Dog Kennels to Car Tyre factories however the company had page 1 for the term "Web Design", and a Pagerank 7. However, for traffic and optimum "link worth" yes related is definately best and who knows what Google will pull in the near future.
A link from a programming site to a hosting site will certainly help. Google sees it as being in the same Theme as Hosting, just take a look at DMOZ and you'll see programming websites close to hosting websites. Google search "Topical Theme Vectoring"
our sotware company site has been linked to some fishing site. is it useless at all? i thought all links count in some way. was i wrong?
So how does google know that programming site is similar to hosting site if the keywords are different? Are you saying that google BOT is same intelligent as HUMAN working at Dmoz?
They can calculate how close themes are to each other by looking at how far apart they are in the web. In other words: how many links does it take (on average or something) to get from one subject to the next. If you know a bit about graphs in mathematics you can see that it's possible to calculate the distance between points in the graph by the amount of nodes between them. It's precisely this sort of thing that google engineers are geniuses at. That's how they get targeted ads on our sites, for instance (well, closely related technology anyhow).
All links count in some way, but links from a software site to a fishing site is as unrelated as they go. So it will count for pagerank, but very little (not nothing) for the serps. And if the link has 'fishing site' in the link-text, that will certainly help the fishing site - a bit.