Hello, We want to ask you guys your thoughts on this theory. Let's say we had the following domain names that we are getting links from: - www.125cd.info - www.plpsystems.com - www.provocsnusoure.com - www.anti-me.com - www.keep-activ.com Now, all of these domains (are not real domains, just using for examples), are General sites, they have no REAL 100% topics, they just have random information, sorted correctly like articles on Real estate, finance, games, technology, business, etc. Now, the thing about these sites, is they looked really good, got pretty good traffic, were all on their own Class C IP Addresses, Private Name Server and Private Registration, had ZERO OBL's on their home pages, had content that was being post 2 or 3 time a week that had no links in them, worked on Social Media for all their post, and have PRs of Pr1 - Pr5. My main question is, since these seems to be pretty good sites, I mean they are all private, no obl's on the home pages, good new fresh unique content, however, these domains were dropped domains, and they have a bunch of random content, although categorized. Would Google pick up on these as bad backlinks simply becuase there was not real niche specific things, or because they were dropped domains, or would these types of sites till bring really good link value, even though their domains are not really niche related, and all content is not 100% niche related.
A backlink is a backlink! If it's relevant, dofollow and placed in the body of the article (no footer, sidebar, blog comment) google will aprove of it. Of course, a niche sites needs mostly niche backlinks but... let's say 10-20% of the backlinks can come from general topic blogs. That's my $0.02...
I think my bigger question, is do you think that Google will devalue "Geneal" topic sites with Domains like this becuase they feel people are buying these and putting these up for link networks.
While I don't believe Google would punish your site for this, simply because your competition would do this in order to out rank your site, people will never really know for sure because Google keeps their ranking methods secret.
General topic blog + a high percentage of posts with outbound links = footprint for blog network. So, you could be looking at penalty or deindexed (this would be my guess, going by what has happened of late).
Short answer: Yes, but they can still add some value if you write a unique on topic post. Slightly longer answer: More important than PR on these general type of sites is that they contain a large number of general news backlinks since PR is pretty simple to manipulate. Generally if there is a large discrepancy between Alexa and PR then something is afoul. Also, if these sites are all from one seller than I would pick up only one post since even if they are an different IP's they are likely interlinked and thus a link graph could view them as a network. A link on one of the sites in a network is not 'penalty' factor. However, if you obtain links from each site on the network than that is a strong signal to Google the link is possibly a 'paid' one.