Impact of 500 million links from 1 site to mine?

I agree with freelistfool. Ask for the homepage, that way you will get a good link back without raising too many flags at google or any other search engine.

Josh

 

You guys are a paranoid lot on here. Google will not penalize a site owner if someone else links to you. Unless they determine you paid for those links. I mean really what is to stop someone from linking to you without you even knowing about it? 500 Million pages is a hell of a lot, but it will not make your site the cats meow. It will NOT hurt you in any way. Especially an Alexa ranked 1800 or so forum. Just think about sites like the NY Times, or the LA times. We have been linked to from them. Or when CBS wrote about my job board, we picked up hundreds of affiliate CBS links. If I was not so anal about monitoring what is going on in Webmaster tools I would have never even known about it. Currently we have a little over 1800 back links showing in WM tools. We just jumped to a PR5 not bad for only 4 months old.

Think I am full of it go look at jobshouts dot com. BTW I have an insane amount of links from twitter (4000+). most of them are not even counted though.

 

Google will not penalize you for links people place on their site(s). Otherwise, you could post links for your competitors and get them penalized. If you link back, however, that is another story. This tells Google that you are in a "linking" relationship" with this site. If Google looks poorly on the site, then this "linking relationship" can hurt you. What you're saying, however, is that Google is giving this site a PR of 5. This is good.

Nevertheless, 500 million footer links from one site isn't worth much more than one index page link from the same site. Google views a link like a vote. You can't have one site vote for you 500 million times and expect that Google will even count more than the first few.

That's also why having thousands and thousand of links on the same forum site will not count as thousands and thousands of votes. They might all get indexed, but this does not all mean they will all help your PR.

My advice, though, is take the footer links and wait to see. It will definitely help, but who can say by how much.