Help Please??? A friend and I are having small 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
They won't penalize for a few unrelated sites, but if you have a ton of backlinks from unrelated sites they will. For example, my cat site had like 3000 backlinks from unrelated sites and as a result I wasn't even ranked #1 when I googled my actual url. Strangely enough, suddenly my ranking went to first page for its keyword randomly. So based on what has happened, I think they DO penalize you for too many unrelated sites, but only temporarily. So I say build as many as you can either way, since it will help in the long run.
one of my site is a travel site, which has a small section about wildlife in the destination someone at NASA had a machine that broke, turned out it was because an animal had got in the works somehow. As part of their explaining the problem they linked to my page about the animal their site isn't about travel, my site isn't about space, and neither site is about animals google webmasters now tells me that my highest ranking page is my small article about a certain animal, rather than any of the thousands of carefully written or purchased travel articles! so I think getting occasional links from un-related sites will do no harm
Backlinks from a lot of different sources wont necessarily do harm. What google WILL have problem in doing will be defining exactly what your site is about. If you have some soccer backlinks, some space backlinks, some pet backlinks etc., google will have no idea exactly what your site is about, and it'd not be in the high enough parts of the SERPS.
Bah. Google knows what your site is about by the content and the anchor texts. But getting back to the initial question, seems like you are asking if links "in the templates of blogs" are ok....I assume he means sponsored wordpress themes. THAT can get you penalized. Google is hip to that, although it could take a year or more for them to catch on. I have been doing all sorts of themes for the site in my sig and ranking great - if for some reason Google catches me I'll switch to a different domain name and move on.
i don't believe there's a penalty for links from unrelated sites. it just matters more if the links are from authority sites within your niche. as mentioned above, it helps define how your site should be categorized.
I don't think G will value the links as much, but I don't think you're penalized. If that would penalize you, I would do it for all of my competitors.
Unless the backlinks are from bad neighborhood there is no reason to get penalize because for a popular site many other website tend to link naturally.
According to the blog post Google made and the advice the Google Guys on the Google Groups Support gave me, the links you build do give you a boast unless you have loads of unrelated links, and in that case, they just simply ignore the links - So your rankings decrease not because of a penalty, but because you've had a huge decrease in backlinks.
It will do no harm as Google counts only quality links. But, that will surely help you to increase your site's PR.
Google never penalize for backlinks. If it used to penalize, then people will start to build backlinks for their competitors from unrelated sites so that their sites get penalized. Worst that happens is that google is simply ignore all the unrelated links.
In my opinion, it is very likely that G determines the ratio of related links to total links and that this number fits into the overall site's score. If that is true, then the more related links you have the better. /*tom*/
the G force is telling me NO! Why would google ever punish somebody for a link? I can see them not giving them much value if any at all but punish? I think that social links are down pretty far on the value list. a PR 7 site is going to give you value weather or not it's in the same niche, cause google gave them a pr7 for a reason and it's the same reason that you would let your brother use your truck to move. Trust.