In my opinion, I don't think getting irrelevant links would hurt you. If anything it might add to the juice or it might not hold any weight at all. You've got to think this because any one can put YOUR link on any site of their own at anytime. It would just be disastrous if this is the way it worked.
According to google they will just be devalued or valued less. They cannot hurt your site else competitors would place hundreds of these links and similar to get the competition delisted or penalized.
No - I think you're more confused about what you think than everyone else. Just about everyone said the same thing ... and those are "confused answers".... Weight and PageRank are the same thing? You got to move outside the box to view the whole picture. DMOZ aggregates pages of information much like a blog does... it has 600,000 pages and but 1 or 2 pages to any single topic... thus you can easily define dmoz as a "unrelated resource" to all topics since it doesn't focus only on any niche... and according to conventional SEO thinking unrelated links don't help. wikipedia is much the same way [they now nofollow their links but if they didn't] because the bulk of the domains "isn't about you topics" it must be "unrelated" and according to conventional SEO thinking pretty much worthless. The only difference between the 2 resource and any other web resource in any topic is these have more overall clout thus what they lack in immdiately related topics thaey gain in overall trust [which includes weight] but they are the same as any "low form of off topic domain whether a blog or some other cms. So while I agree that it is "ALWAYS" better to solicit links from similarly topic oriented websites... I'm also 100% positive you won't "EVER" say to dmoz... "no I don't want a link - remove it... your dmoz website isn't just about what we offer." In context, a SEO brought into my network a client with a memory foam website. One of my blog discusses "hard to fathom things"... usual or difficult to understand nuances of the industry... the SEO outsource a writer to take on that challenge... the writer sent back an article about "pet beds"... for old animals using "of course" memory foam... 1. Is the article "related to memory foam"? 2. Is the article "related to pets" In your wildest dreams would you "EVER" think the website types would be "related"? Think outside the box... 6 degrees of separation... a Tree site to a Winter Tires site is Tree > Rubber Tree > Industrial Rubber > Tires > Winter Tires [that's 5 degrees]
A link is a link is a link, But a quality relevant link is better, but a lot of back links are good. I recently tested this by linking to 650 unrelated sites for my domain and my pagerank jumped for now
I am assuming you are the friend mentioned in the OP? People are equating linking for PR, with linking for relativity or context. The two are not the same. In the case of PR, any link is good for that ('a link is a link'). Linking to a bad site can hurt the linker though. As for 'templated' links, I am assuming you are talking about links in your footer, header or sidebar templates. In those cases, links are becoming more and more devalued overall. It is common knowledge that the SEs can spot sections of a webpage. MSSearch filed a patent for this technique, and Google is, well, ahead of them altogether. It may still pass some PR, but the contextual value of the link may not help you at all when it comes to SERPs.
Unrelated links won't be harmful if only a few. However thousands of unrelated links (sponsoring blog themes etc) can lead to Google penalising your site.
Penalizing for a credit link? Hogwash. If that were the case, then the makers of this forum software (vBulletin), as well as, phpBB, MyBB, SMF, Wordpress, and even Blogger themselves would be penalized. Devalued, or not counted, is more like it.
I'm not going to get into a pissy arguement with you, there's no need and it doesn't help the OP's question. From your statement above I can see we basically agree on this topic. I'm sorry if my answer was not clear to you. I was simply stating that too many people emphasize getting mass backlinks in general, and that getting on-topic links helps immensely more than off-topic links. Regardless of pagerank, which most give too much emphasis on. No harm, no foul if you get a random link from unrelated sites, but they won't be nearly as helpful.
i dont think so that unrelated links are bad or else they are backlinks but with different weight.and all are good.
There is a difference between wordpress having their link in the footer - as credit, and me paying to get a spammy "sponsored by" link...
Is that all? Are you going to elaborate on that any more? And besides, you only mentioned blog theme "made by" links and how they would penalize your site for using them. That is total bull. Now you are throwing paid sponsor links into the conversation, which is a totally different topic altogether. Those will get you nothing but ill-will, if you are caught. Just ask John.
not true otherwise we could build links to our competition and it would knock them out of the rankings. maybe they don't help as much as related links, but they don't hurt ya
Are you kidding? I've been using backlinking techniques for an article I wrote and submitted on September 30; two weeks ago. I've been building backlinks to the article; many of them are on High Page Rank sites that wouldn't be considered "relevant". They are also on "inner pages" that don't carry the same Page Rank as the index page of the websites. About five days ago, I did a search for the article's position on Google and it was nowhere to be found...not in the top 100, anyway. Today, it is #23 on Google (WITH quotes...out of almost 9 MILLION results) or #35 WITHOUT quotes...out of 11 MILLION results. I'm still working on building links to it and it will be on page one soon. This is in exactly two week's time. I used many of the links I give to my customers in my monthly service.
I make the assumption that the value of a link from unrelated sites is determined by the ratio of unrelated authoritiy and/or high pr sites linking to your page to the amount of unrelated low authority or even spam sites linking to you the history of backlink building speed is take into account from either of these 2 groups of sites to your site and what the history is of your own site in terms of getting backlinks the place in layout where the link is the anchor text ( the example of wordpress sponsored by xyz) can devalue a link and so on and so on ( if you want to know almost all there is publically to know read the patent of googles algo`s lol and expect heavy maths) if all that taken into account and the calculation is positive which it will almost always be then you get a cetain value which may or may not help you in serps depending on the "weight"/ value it ends up with. But I must stress that it is possible to get banned this way now you ask why wordpress and dmoz etc do not get banned for this they are high authority sites which have a +history and are calculated different for in googles algos why does the site hereabove grow in serps for her article so fast is much to do with a positive history she has build up with google search engine do that with a new site getting higher in serps requires building a relationship with the search engine, treat her like a fine lady but be as cunning as she is( or even more lol) you will have a lot less effect and if little to none authority sites link to you and you are a new site with a lot of unrelated backlinks you are looking to come in the grey zone where sites are to be looked at in more detail by googles algorithym and possibly banned hope this clarifies a bit
Actually I said sponsoring right in my first post - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=9514447&postcount=29 I have had a site penalised myself for sponsoring wordpress themes, as have others. wpthemesfree.com itself was penalised as all themes it released had its own link stuffed into the footer. Matt Cutts advised in his blog that sponsoring wordpress themes was a form of SERP manipulation, just the same as paid links, and if done too much would lead to penalties.
Some extensive testing on my way part would certainly suggest this statement is false. I successfully managed to have a page pinged by Google by building a significant amount of links back to the page from A LOT of unrelated sources.
I agree with matrix.. You are right, no one knows what Google does exactly. I have linked many ways with many sites, and have seen good results sometimes and bad results others, even when doing the same thing for each site. Wonder if google reads our posts and is sitting back laughing? Wonder if they wven know what they do?