Say you have a page about fruits and you get links from sites that have computer parts or are involved with windows? How badly can these affect (if it does) your serps ?
Um, no. That is complete and utter nonsense. You cannot be hurt by links from another site. If you could be hurt by links from porn and casino sites, your competitors would link back to you from porn and casino sites. There is a difference in the value of links, and obviously the more relevant the links and the more authority the site has the better. But you can never be hurt by having another site link to you. It might not help much having irrelevant links, but it can't hurt.
I can't remember where I read it, but recently there was an article somewhere about an SEO guy that did "nagative SEO" where he spammed thousands of links to a competitors site over a weekend and they usually got dropped down in Google because Google assumed they were link spamming. Not sure how true it is though!
The theory is, it can't hurt you - or what is to stop your competitors buying a bad neighborhood, and linking right left and centre to your website?
i dont think it will hurt your site but giving links to nonrelated sites may hurt the site which your link stays but not yours
That was the point of the article I read - highlighting the alarming fact that this was possible. To me it makes no sense though, if Google could detect "potential link spamming" they could make it have NO affect, rather than a negative or positive affect, and all would be good
bang on mamtasaini, yes hanging around bad neighboor hoods can, do, and will damage your site. if you are going to spam bad sites you would be far beter of writing some quality well researched content and try to activly encourage people to link to your site -
This is 100% true in my opinion - I have never seen any evidence to counter this and plenty of evidence in favour of this. Matt Cutts (The Google Spam Fighter) has actually said that Google works to make sure that a link from Site A can't hurt Site B. Only things you do on your own site can hurt you - e.g linking to a spam site.
That was thecase, but times have changed it seems... Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't impossible, but it's extremely difficult. "We try to be mindful....... source:http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/negative-search-google-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0628seo.html
Yes it is just myth that these unrelated links can hurt you. Worst they could do is not help you at all.