Do irrelevant backlinks matter?

Hi,

I've seen a couple of SEO websites mention the negative effect of irrelevant backlinks to a website. Does Google check if backlinks are relevant? How about link directories, do they have a negative effect on your ranking?

Regards,

FY

 

General speaking backlinks don't hurt a site in terms of ranking. However they can help in determining what a site is about.

For Example. if you have 1000 backlinks from sites related to dogs and only a few links related to cats then google will categorise the site more towards dogs then cats. Directory links won't hurt a site, they just won't have any value. There are really only a few directories now that can help with rankings. Most of the others have minimal impact.

 

No, they won't negatively affect your site, however lots of links from "bad neighborhoods" such as sites with malware, casino sites, pharmacy sites, porn, etc. could drop your rankings.

 

As for as my SEO experience is concerned no irrelevant wont hurt you because if two popular sites are in competition and they want to break each other SEO then they can easily hurt each other via giving irrelevant backlinks to eachother thats why i dont think so search engines will have minimized the impact of irrelevant backlinks.
And about the directories i can say that some good out there can really boost you and index you up for your keywords.

 

In my experience there is no such thing as an irrelevant backlink.

 

The backlinks from OnFocus websites are very much important for the high PR & SERP.

 

Doesnt matter but it will not improve your ranking

 

They also don’t realize the vantage that you can get from leveraging the social expressions of the internet to get links.The trouble isn’t whether backlinks subject for most sellers though. It is that nearly marketers don’t get the big picture conception of why back links thing in the first place.

 

Irrelevant BL's wont hurt your site's rankings but it says about the quality of your site.

 

PHP:

Generally speaking, if you have a new site and have 1,000 spam back links, you might as well flush it down the toilet, cause it won't be on the first page of Google. You have to be very careful these days. My site was on the first page, and one Fiverr gig later, gone.

 

Irrelevant back links are not going to give you negative ranking but the thing is that google use the back links for determining a sites niche.
But you should be careful about link generating, mean you are not going to get 1000 back links in a day but if you get 1000 back links in a day then it is considered as spam and google will ban you for that.

 

Quality backlinks help no matter where they come from. I get a lot of my high PR links from news and software sites that nothing to do with what I'm promoting. They definitely help with rankings.

Relevancy is hard to tell anyways. For instance, what does CNN link to? There could be 1,000,000 niches that are newsworthy to them. Who does wikipedia link to? Which niche is that?

Get quality links and don't worry so much about relevancy.

 

I have one site that is in really specific niche and getting related backlinks is almost impossible so I am getting all kind of backlinks even if they has nothing to do with my website.

Those are I am calling irrelevant backlinks but they are counted by Google, maybe not as good as others but they aren't completely irrelevant

 

Nothing to worry about it if your backlink is from quality site
The negative effect happen only if most of your backlink from link farm or crap site (you can never get relevant link from link farm)