Unrelated Links Harmful?? I thinks so...

Hi Guys,

A friend and I are having a minor dispute with regards to creating links from unrelated sites.

He says: "as they are in the template of blogs etc...and not the comment boxes" they are not harmful

I say: because they are not industry related we may get penalized for them in the SERPS

Anyway your comments or best Practise ideas would be most helpful...

Many thanks,

Theresa

 

Just to clarify - there a less than 20 links in the blog templates and the blogs all carry good content. They are not spam blogs or related to adult sites, poker or anything naughty. All white hat. There are about five of them in total, they don't even have adsense on them. Only one link per site in the template not hundreds. I am aware that related sites are better but is their harm in linking this way?

 

A link is a link... some links are way better than others but any link with any amount of link juice will help.

A press release domains "isn't only about you and your industry" nor a news blog... but both can have a story related to you and these are are have getting "just a link on some unrelated page"... and getting a link is a blog that focuses only on your indsutry is better than any of the previous.

There are some clearly define "manipulative link strategies" that tend to draw on quantity of links rather than the quality of "a link" and these can get you in trouble to the point that you lose all benefit from that resource [which you may have had previously] but it is next to impossible to have "links over here" effect links over there... e.g. being penalized... unless A and b have something in common like ownership or whois.

So in the end "unrelated links" aren't "BAD"... they just don't help alot.

 

Hi theresaseo,

In our experience, related quality links help way more than en-related links could ever do, especially ones with PR. But having said that there are some anomalies that crop up with sites using unrelated links that still benefit.

In terms of best practices you are right.

Regards,
EIMG

 

Theresa,

It's very hard to get extremely relevant links. You should be fine... If your wanting link that are like 200 percent relevant then you'll pay an arm and leg for them links, but most links from blogs will also be linking out to various other sites. You should be fine.

 

In my own opinion... It's not harmful it just loosen the quality of your site/blog by linking to unrelated sites...

 

As long as you are not paying to sponsor templates, or buying blogroll links, you should be safe from a penalty. Many people comment on unrelated blogs and still leave their links. That is ok, but the SEO benefit is greatly reduced. Also, many blog owners want real names in the name field. Akismet will ban the URL if enough bloggers report those comments as spam.

 

Unrelated links may be devalued but penalty is a strong word.

 

I just never understood this concept, yahoo and dmoz are having gambling, porn and pharmacy listings in their dir. and still people are chasing them like crazy.

Just for example in this thread lot of people having diff. signatures, so if someone having porn, gambling link in his sig. and if he posts in this thread, will that hurt our sites which are in our sigs.???

 

Very good point. I don't think google relates links in forums. Maybe their algo for forums could be different. Otherwise every link in everyone's signature would have been penalized.

irrelevant links is beyond me

 

Very very good point, rep. added.

i think a backlink is a backlink, no matter where it comes from.

 

Its something like the amount of benefit you get in posting here is also less and so is the case otherwise because on a page you tend to have 20 posts and so that means you have atleast 20 x 4 (4 link in sig) and so at least 80 external link and pages tend to get burried to many pages down and so the link benefit is less.

Now people run after PR links and as DMOZ pages have higher PR and so that is the case but then having a PORN link in DMoz does not mean on other pages you cannot have good links. Its not about sites being blacklisted but its all about pages.

If digitalpoint happens to get link in DMOZ where there is adult content then it could be a problem

 

No link can have a negative effect
otherwise we could be getting BAD links for our Competitors
just to get rid of the m

instead some links might not be adding any value to a website
(usually unrelated links will pass a little bit of link value if any at all)

 

I tend to agree with the sentiments here, no link is going to hurt your rankings but there is always the possibility of links like you describe being ignored/discounted in terms of rankings/PR.

However I would say that a good quantity of links, related or not, will help your site get crawled more often meaning any new pages should get indexed in less time.

Not to mention the possibility of getting some traffic from the links, after all isn't that the original point of links?

 

I think we all are playing guessing game, bcoz nobody exactly knows what google does

 

Type in google.com 'click here'. The first one is Adobe ! Why ? Because most of links to Adobe is with link anchor: 'click here'. Now, can anyone tell me what niche is 'click here' Is that related or unrelated link ?

 

Links from unrelated sites do hold a bit of weight and don't see why Google would penalize a site for that. We don't really control who links back to us.

 

Unrelated links won't hurt you assuming google doesn't think they are purchased links. On the other hand they won't help much either.

 

unrelated links definitely wont hurt you but it is better to have your links on sites that do have more relevant content to your niche so that you can ensure that your not just getting a link but giving people a useful resource rather then spamming a page. WIN WIN

 

A lot of confused answers...

All links have weight based on # of links to the page that backlink comes from minus outgoing links from the same page. AKA pagerank. How much of that weight is helpful to your page is determined by the keyword you're going after.

So no, its not simply a link is a link. It will not hurt, but it will only help a percentage toward off-topic keywords.

Then there's geo seo to consider as well, but that's a whole other topic