You guys are totally wrong. Even if you disregard my knowledge and experience, there's this: Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. From this page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356 Read that page in entirety. What it says is that if a bunch of crappy pages link to you, your butt WILL get penalized. You are then supposed to fix the issue - don't ask me how, since the sites linking to you are not under your control - and ask for reinclusion. Congratulations! You kids learned something today.
"Read that page in entirety. What it says is that if a bunch of crappy pages link to you, your butt WILL get penalized. You are then supposed to fix the issue - don't ask me how, since the sites linking to you are not under your control - and ask for reinclusion." Please don't editorialize ... nowhere on that page does it mention anything about having to control or "fix" the sites that are linking to you. Here is the real quote from that page ... " * Links intended to manipulate PageRank * Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web * Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.") * Buying or selling links that pass PageRank " ... all of these issues would effect the page LINKING out to recieve a penalty. Someone who has a bad link pointing toward them cannot do anything about it ... unless they own the site. One bad situation I CAN think of is ... if you built thousands of pages on the same domain for the sole purpose of pointing to just a single page on that same domain to make it rank well. That would probably be a no-no.
So what does this mean: It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. In case you STILL don't get it links you have pointing to your site means links that are linking TO you. The sentence after next tells you Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration. Look, if you don't WANT to learn, you will NEVER learn. Obviously you have made up your mind that what you believe is true no matter what, so irrespective of what information you get from whom, you just go into denial. Ignorance is an acceptable excuse for beginners, but generally I find that many ignorant people - like you - are ignorant, and have been ignorant for a long time, and continue to stay ignorant, because they willfully shut out new information. It seems you want to stay ignorant, so fine, believe what you like. But I'm done arguing with the likes of you.
That means placing a link on a social bookmarking site 1,000 times will likely mean nothing because all those links are PR N/A. Getting a link from an established page that is PR 5 will actually give you some juice. To put it in other terms ... making a new post on this forum and placing a link within it will do pretty much nothing for you ... because it will be PR N/A or PR0 ... go back a few months in the history and you'll see posts that are now PR1 or PR2 ... those are worth more because they're more "established". Having your link on pages that have something to do with the topic of your page is even better ... monosodium ... I'm not bashing you, but I strongly believe you are misinterpreting google's guidelines. How many websites do you run and how long have you been running them? I've been doing this for quite some time now, and have seen this same discussing many times over by both beginners and experts (who have been in the field for 10 plus years) ... so ... My stance is the same, you have no control over what external sites point to my site and google would never ban you for that ... if this were true ... why wouldn't I simply point thousands of bad links at the very competitors I'm trying to overtake right now? Also ... as for this quote "Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration." ... that is referring to webmasters that try to ghost links ... aka white text on white backgrounds ... or people who try to keyword stuff their pages ... that is a huge no-no. It is also for people who point OUT to bad neighborhoods ... in that case google would ban you ... and you'd have to remove the violating link and request to be put back into the index. Anyone else have any input? Matt
Okay, you know what ... I'm done arguing because that never gets anywhere. To the OP, I say take the link, it'll probably drop to PR0 ... and the worst that can happen is you won't get any link juice as long as YOU don't link to THEM. To monosodium, good luck in whatever you do ... just keep in mind that not being aggressive in this field will leave you pretty disappointed ... I was for 2 years because of the "fear" surrounding each and everything that is involved in internet marketing. I find that backing up my claims usually ends most discussions ... so here are a couple of resources ... I suggest you read through them. http://www.aplus.net.nz/SEO-Tutorial/Ban-Website-OffPage-Factors.html http://www.zimbio.com/Cbarker.WS/articles/3/Reasons+behind+Websites+get+banned+Google
There are a couple of things to be considered: - Google may exclude sites in full (no links in Google index at all), sometimes PR stays - but I don´t believe they have any value. Published PR is just a "sticker" like a flag hanging on the wall - if the house is "banned" why should Google take care of anything what goes on. More precisely: Google still visits banned sites with the bot, but does NOT update any information, its simply dead I think one single link from such a site will not hurt, but will not help as well. The other thing are "penalties" like degradation of PR or moving the site backwards in the index. This is the mild form of penalty - and difficult to see the outcome for the links on this page. I don´t think that a mild penalty will cause big problems, but thats just a feeling
If that site has been penalised by Google, and u link to the site, it probably the so called bad neighbour in Google's eyes. But, if they link to your before they get penalised, then I guess it won't have too much effect on it imho.