Linking with non related sites

Hi

I am wondering whether I might get hurt in search engine rankings/results if I link with sites that are not related to me at all.

Say I run a football site and I link with humor sites?

 

Linking with non related sites will not effect the SERP. One thing is clear, it does not have any positive result. So linking with non related sites is waste of time.

 

It could bring me visitors though.

Can it affect my SERP in any negative way?

 

It won’t help you, and if you link to link farms it will hurt you!
the algos of the future may take linking to unrelated sites as a negative effect, try to build quality content with quality links.

 

fair enough.

i was thinking of linking to davesdaily.com from my football forum ( an vice versa ).
I guess I better now.

 

Even though you're looking for traffic between the two sites, it's unlikely that you'll get quality traffic because people on the humor site are less likely to click on the football site since the topics vary by a lot.

 

It should be quality traffic, because lots of people visits humor sites and like football.

 

if your link is in a link farm , that will hurt your site. on the otherwise link is link . it will bring hit to your site and improve your page rank

 

You shoudnt do, it depends if they if you link to them without you linking back then it would do great for you allthough if you link to them and and them ect.. google may get abit confused about what content is accually on your site

 

Impossible for the link to hurt you, that will make it to easy for your competition to hurt a your site.

Remember that you are building a site for your users and not the SE. Don't just get links that would not be of any benifit to the users

 

Think of the links you offer your visitors as a form of content. What you want is for your visitors to like the site and return. If you provide good links to sites that have information that will suppliment their visit to your site, they will likely regard you as a decent site to visit. If you can build relevance, like if your site is for football and you want to let people know about a fun site to visit during half-time, that's fine as long as you don't mislead your visitors about what the links are about. Humor sites can link with just about anybody without losing face, but if you're doing a football site, just put sites that don't really fit with your theme in a special area called half-time and describe the sites accurately, and it might be a nice element to add.

 

Non-related backlinks CAN help you in SERPs and I have one to proove it. In my sig there is a link to Music Boxes. Has nothing to do with computers, SEO, or anything technical at all.

Yet adding it to my signature boosted it from nowhere in the top 10,000 results to #26 in less than a week.

All backlinks help, but experience has told me that related backlinks are BETTER and MORE EFFECTIVE than non-related.

 

I've asked this before and from what others have told me is that it can't hurt you, but it's possible that it cannot benefit you in search engine terms.

 

You might want to read this on seomoz.org about keywords and search results:
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1512

 

IF you don't put a link back

 

I absolutely agree. Put the link on a page where it fits, like 'other interests' or something - or 'my other sites' or whatever. Unrelated links (if not to link-farms) do still matter. The border to 'link-farm' (you want neither website to become that) is when most of the content on your site starts being unrelated to your site. But a normal link, with descriptive link-text, to another site, will still generally help that second site. If both sites are really meant for people (not MFA or something) linking to them would also not hurt your own site. It's clear you should not overdo it, but in general it will not hurt you. Don't do a sitewide though - I would consider that overdoing it.