After spending a few days on the forum I have noticed quite a few people asking the same sort of question: Can a link to my website harm the website in question? Seeing as the question is asked so much I thought I would post my thoughts on the subject. No link to you can harm your website I will properly have a hundred people posting saying that there is such thing as a harmful link but just hear me out and you will get what I mean as you read on. My thought on links is that a link pointing to your website can never harm your website. If you think about it logically it would make no sense at all for the search engines to punish your website for something that is not in your control. If the search engines punished your website for a link pointing to it you would have everyone who wanted to be on top of the search engines running out and buying hundreds of bad links and pointing them to there rivals. What I think search engines are more likely to do with a bad link (e.g. A spammy link or a link on a bad neighbour) is that rather then punish your website, is that they will devalue the link so that it is worthless, meaning that you will not get any PR or SERPs boost from a link on a bad neighbourhood. So really there is no such thing as a harmful link, instead its just a link that you will not get any value from.
It doesnt make logical sense for a search engine to punish for incoming links, yes, but are search engines always logical? Ask yourself this question. I've had experience - for example - building too many links too quickly. This resulted in SERP drops I could see near immediately. This may effect newer sites more than established sites... I added sitewide links too quickly to one of my older sites (atleast 8+ months old) and I saw decreases in ranking. This site has dropped 2 rankings, but I believe will recover soon enough.
Search engines don't punish websites. They do what they can to serve up the most useful and relevant results to searchers. If, for some reason, your website has done something, or had something done to it, that makes it less relevant, it will not do well in serps. Whining 'please, miss, it wasn't me' means nothing to the search engine. It doesn't have a relationship with you, or any webmaster. Saying it won't have an effect just because someone else did it is nonsense. If someone else hacked into your site and riddled it with malware, would you expect google to ignore that becuase you didn't do, so shouldn't be punished?
Hmm i think u answered ur own question didnt u lol, if links could harm ur site then ur competators, could just buy a load links and point them at ur site and get ur site penalised ! Woc
Its not possible. First thing is that no competitors are going to do this. Its just an assumption. Every website are too much busy in building their link. Secondly if someone do this then also google is smart it will not give important to non relevant links. Yes and if too much of links are from non relevant source then only google will give penatly Ask why ? because every website who is in competition is going to have some relevant links so if non relevant ratio is there it google will not give penalty unless the domain is having relevant links
The consensus seems to be that inbound links cannot pennalize you. If they did, it would be too easy to spam a competitor and get there ranking devalued and worst case banned! Out bound links however are a different matter, I suppose the thinking being, if you link to a spammy site, you are trying to promote it ...
I was answering the question because quite a few people have asked the question can pointing to my website harm it.
I agree with you. I'll go furter, and say that, logically: Those from Google can't automatically punish those who sell links. Let's say that they punish you because 2 or more revealed link sellers point to you. It's clear that you buy links because many point to you, not only one. The next step is seeing that you loose power, and by dooing this you will certainly have an ace up your sleeve. The next thing you can do is use this knowledge against your competition. See what's the most powerfull and relevant link that points to them and then hit it with all the link sellers. An automated judge is not the answer as it can bring chaos. And Google is more than that. They are smart. There must be manual review of the most important sites that can promote, before they do it, but I doubt it they have an automated method.
In terms of being penalized its the sites that YOU link to that are important, not those that link to you. So be careful with any link exchanges or if you decide to sell links on your site, as these can harm your site.
I disagree.. who links to you is way more important. But they both do play a role, but the your inbound links is by far more important. It determines the source of all your links, trying to find a pattern to see if they are paid or how relevant they are etc. etc. Who you link to doesn't really matter in the end.
if an external link poiting to your site can penalize you... then some people could put "bad links" to their competitors site to get them penalized. Dosent make sense.
Yep, bad links don't hurt your website at all but only relevant links of quality do anything for your website.
Hello to all the member here. If I give a link from my site, will the harm the SERP result? How many links can I give out of my site?
Should have made a poll or something... i would like to see who agrees/disagrees without reading all the posts hehe!
I think a backlink will not harm a site but an unrelated link will also do no good. May be lots of links from unrelated site can harm your site. As tacox mentioned some time there is no logic or a logic can not be found for the actions taken by big G.