Hi All In terms of pagerank, can you get negative benefit from a link? i.e If a warez site linked to my site could that actually take my pagerank down? I've heard that links FROM bad sites can't hurt you, because you technically have no control over who links to you. It's only if you link TO a bad site that your pagerank can suffer. Is this true>?
You are correct. If it were otherwise, then your competitors could sabotage your website by getting links from disreputable sites pointed to your site. The search-engine engineers are smarter than that.
What about for image search ? For instance, say a site with ties to porn links to you. Might that get you flagged in image search so that your images only show when safe search is turned off completely ?
Yes backlinks as well as for image search... its a disadvantage if your site/blog is linked to any spammy or banned sites... Thatz the reason you need to check your backlinks once every week as Google itself updates the backlinks of sites every two weeks...
Its impossible for links linking towards your site to have any negative effect on your rankings or PR. Otherwise all we would need to do is link our competitors to porn sites and the like, then watch them suffer. This is also true of the image searches.
If you actually get the info from google, google will tell you over and over that links in do not do anything. Quality links give PR, that's it. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/dealing-with-low-quality-backlinks.html Google says it best when they say that one should not worry about what one has no control over: who links to your site. There are so many other things that google looks at and you CAN control. As someone said, it would be very easy to ruin a competitor if this was true. Set up a porn, warez, drug, gambling, etc. site and link em to all your enemies. Makes no sense when you think about it. People confuse this with links on YOUR own websites to these sites. Do it, and google will ban you in a heart beat. Stephen C
I have an opinion that is different from most people. You inspired me to start a thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1712684
That's not correct If some spammy site gives ur link to their website (i.e, Incoming links) tht doesn't affects u, cozz that's totally understandable that this can be done by many competitors, hence Google doesn't counts that , but if you put there spammy links on your website (i.e, outgoing links) it could really hurt your site PR. Basically your website PR is affected majorly by what you perform on you site (i.e, on-site) not what others performs on their websites. crg
100% correct. People have tried to send 30,000 fake spam viagra links to competitors in hopes that google would see that they were "shady" and knock them off the serps. Didnt work. Google is smart enough to know that people will try anything to get their sites on the first page, so they know most of the tricks.
NO. this is not possible as links from such sites could be done from your competitors and this is why there is nothing affect on your website.
Corrrect, links from bad sites cannot hurt you. Links TO bad sites used to hurt you, but now they may be discounted in some situations, e.g. if they appear in blog comments or forum posts. The guiding principle is that if Google cannot determine that you linked from the bad site to your site on purpose, then it has to assume its not your intention and thus YOU don't deserve a penalty. Same with if the link appears in a discounted context -- in that case you don't deserve a penalty.