I have always been told that incoming links, i.e. when other sites have your link on their site, cannot hurt your site. But you can be hurt with the quality of links you have on your site. The reason for my thinking is that if Site A wanted to damage Site B, it would go out and place Site A's link on some bad sites. Therefore, I have always been told that regardless of the quality of the sites that had your link, it would not harm your site. Now, I am being told that this is not true. That a bad site (in the eyes of the search engines) can harm you site if they have your link on their site. What do you guys think?? Thanks, in advance!!
Link farms and other bad websites can possibly hurt you, but I'm not too sure that a typical link will hurt you too bad. Then again, I've heard that if you have thousands/hundreds of valid PR0 links it can affect your PageRank negatively, but I'm not 100% sure here.
if you are not going to link them, you will not be effected from those links because you have no effect on which sites are giving link you
Can I get some help with this. My SEO guys insist that bad sites that have your link can hurt you, but I have always heard that they can't.
This is from Google's Webmaster Help Center, "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links." They do not mention the effect of who is linking to you. I think they realize that anyone could add a site to a link farm and cause their competition to be hurt. Google probably would not penalize a site based upon who links to them. However, they would not receive any link juice from the linking site. I've also read through much of Matt Cutt's blog looking for any mention of an answer to your question and didn't see anything.
i cannot see how this can be true. as long as you're not linking back to taking part in a link farm, you should be alright...
I think that if sites linking to your site could damage your site - then this would be way to easy to damage your competitors sites or vice versa. Having links in link farms and spamming links in bulk wont have any effect on your site either if you are trying to get inbound links and improve PR. These are Google scare tactics and it's a pretty broad answer.
Don't take part in Link farms or automated link exchange with any sites (not related to ur site) and you will be fine
Firstly hope you are not doing any black ops. No time for that. I think that links can hurt. I am sure that G can detect some of the paid links.~ It doesn't stop me buying though.
No I don't think they can hurt your site. How can it , when you have no control over who links to you?
If I can trawl your sites and within 5 minutes extract the link partners and make a decision if they are paid or not based on the relevance and the location........ Why can't those with IQ's far greater than mine using field of pentiums?? Answer is YES Logic. Not saying it is rare but it logically must be real
^Some people pay for links to get more exposure , is that not the same as advertising? How does google know the intent of each webmaster? Of course there are some distinct sites where it is very obvious , such as MFA sites. But can the same principle be applied to every site online?
Keywords is your answer. Imagine if the text link detector was linked to adwords. An easy algo to cater for eh Ghengis?