Does Google penalize for irrelevant backlinks?

If a website is completely irrelevant to where it is linking, do either websites get penalized?

 

At the present time no.

 

i don't think so
but if you are having very large no. than it might because of mis guiding visitors to visit your site

 

The Google spam team uses this to identify "paid links", and if many irrelevent and illogical links are found by them on your site, there is likely to be a penalty.
That said, relevance is fairly subjective; lots of bloggers, for example, link to sites simply because they like them. Others link to their host, or to a software download link, with out having anything to do with hosting or software.
I don't link to sites unless I perceive some connection to my theme for one important reason: my visitors. For their sake, I only provide links I feel they might reasonoably be interested in.
If a site is completely different from mine, why should I offer my niche visitors links like viagra or real estate that won't be what they came to my site to find?
Of course, a general site could logically link to nearly anything.
Common sense is your guide. How would you feel if, as a user, you clicked that link on your site?
If you think your user would be disappointed, perhaps avoid such links.

 

its tricky to say
if you had a million spammy inlinks from one site you could have bought them or a competitor may have pointed them at you to make you look bad...i don't see how google could tell which of these occurred.

 

They just have little to no value SEO wise; this would be the worse case senario.

 

Google will never penalize you for getting irrelevant links.

 

No penalty I think, otherwise your competitors would be able to kill your site by spamming you with irrelevant links.

 

Good thinking.

For any technology Google may develop, they must think about "frame up". If its easy to kill others website other than make own stronger, I think seo will become sea -> search engine assassin

 

Google don't penalize for any kind of back links. Google don't penalize if you get lots of back links at once or get back links from irrelevant sites.

Incase Google penalized for such things then people would start to build back links from irrelevant sites for their competitors in order to get them penalize.

 

No never.
IMO, it won't be possible.
If you have a great tool that checks broken link for any website within 30 to 60 secs.
And the sites related to another niche likes your tool and place your link on their websites, without doing rec. link exchange.
I think google never panelized the site for the same, but may be not passing any link juice from those sites.

 

They can't penalize your site for someone linking to you with an irrelevant link because then competitors could hurt your site by placing bad links to it.

 

I agree here. You don't have control in who links to you so it would be unfair to get a penalty you just won't get rewarded.

 

In my opinion, Google may just simply ignore those link by given zero value on them. This will cause you both no positive and negative. Fairly enough I think.

 

Good point. This makes sense to me. No penalty, just no (or less) link juice because the link doesn't make too much sense between sites.

 

I wonder would there be a penalty from the other end, i.e. a penalty for giving irrelevant links rather than receiving them?

 

Quite possibly, because they would appear as paid links.

 

I don't think they penalize you but they may not reward you for the links either

 

I became a PR6 after an unrelated PR9 linked to me (paid em $2Gs)

Unrelated works- if it's from authority.

 

All know the profit from irrelevant back link is zero. so why this discussion goes here.