First off, I would like to thank everyone for commenting on the post: Can you have a bad link? As promised, I would like to reward those people that left a comment on that post with some link love. This is something that I would like to continue to do to show a little bit of appreciation for those who take the time and leave a comment. This helps to build a more interactive reader base and also helps build a sense of community base that everyone should try to initiate within his or her blog. Without further a do, here are the comments that were posted along with my responses to some of the questions that were being addressed.
SLY MARKETING by Jens P. Berget commented:
I agree with you, or at least from what I have heard, you get penalized from linking to bad websites. But my problem is, what is a bad website?
Response:
1. Website that has not been updated over a period of 3 months
2. A website that uses black hat tactics as a sole means for getting all of their traffic.
3. A website that looks “spammy” with too many advertisements on it. Most of these kind of sites got “Google Slapped”
4. Websites that offer absolutely no benefit for the users or visitors who visit the site.
Sometimes a adult website (porn) is not a bad website, it all depends on your content. If you are running an adult website yourself, then linking to another adult website is not bad at all.
I think that what you mean by a bad website is either a website not related to your content at all (but still, it can be a very popular website and why should you be penalized by linking to it), or a bad website can be a website that has been used for blackhat seo and various “illegal” techniques.
But I just don’t understand why any links can be bad. If I write posts where I publish warnings about certain sites, should I get penalized for linking to them, when I am actually doing a favor to a lot of people?
Response: Most of the time when you are writing up a review about some other website or product and you link to it, Google doesn’t really see that as being negative because you are providing information that can benefit the visitors of your site. As long as you are providing benefits to your website visitors, it will be seen as you trying to help them out, which Google wants you to do.
BINARY CRUNCH by Lamonte commented:
I think it’s retarded that you can get penalized for linking to a “black listed” site. I mean how in the world do you know if its black listed in the first place?
Response:
Check to see if your website has any pages indexed in Google. If your website at one point was ranking well in the Google search engine result pages and all of a sudden dropped out, you should be aware that there may be potential quality penalties tacked on to your website if you all of a sudden have no pages indexed in Google.
Guit Articles by Tennyson Williams commented:
I love your stuff man – great advice always and I look forward to it. I don’t have any bad links, but one thing that I think should be addressed, is how to get links in a difficult niche. I have a blog in a big niche, but the idea of blogs in this niche apparently is a new concept. Its even hard to get the bloggers of this niche to work together, and yet its hard to fit this type of blog into a category on sites like digg or technorati.
Response: This is a very big problem that a lot of bloggers in other niches tend to face quite often. The best resource that I can give you for this is a post by Make Money Online Grizzly titled” Finding Links for Those Niche Blogs.” I would suggest you to held over there for more clarity and then also check out their “Link Resources” page. I hope that this will answer your question.
It’s frustrating. If everyone is building make money or technology sites – then where is the originality?
Response: Once again, the post mentioned above should also help you to answer this question.
I understand going with the flow, but ye who expands upon something truly creates prosperity for others, which is why I love your site because it is actually beneficial.
Thank you so much for everything – it works, is always something new, and I look forward to what you have to say.
Masters of SEO commented:
I would say don’t worry about it. Google is a lot less cruel then it’s depicted to be. As long as you don’t know linking to a link farm (you’d better know what that is) then I think you should be fine. It’s not like there’s some magical number out there of outbound links, which turns a site into a “bad site.” You could lose way to much sleep over this, and the penalty won’t be inflicted unless you do it repeatedly, and knowingly.
Response: Well said, I see you know a little bit about the SEO game that Google likes to play!
Live Life To The Fullest by Matt Helphrey commented:
I wouldn’t think an incoming link would hurt you because as you said, you have no control. As far as linking out to a broken site, it may harm you only because Google likes sites to be updated often. How much it harms or if at all…not really sure.
Response: This is true because Google doesn’t expect you to know every little thing about every site that you link to. Google just cares that you don’t have a consistent pattern of linking to these types of sites.
Dyson Info by Adam commented:
Only links from this site can be considered bad.
Just kidding. I really don’t think so as Google can’t really give relevance that much importance.
Response: I like your sense of humor Adam it brings out a better atmosphere within the blogging world. Lets see if I ever make a comment on your site, lol!
Link Buildr by Ryan commented:
I would only be worried about in content links from a post-marked “PayPerPost”
Response: I have never used the PayPerPost method for my blog, could you possibly provide me with some more insight to why it is bad to use this method?
IM is Easy by Mike Collins commented:
There’s no way you can be punished because a bad site links to you. Its just common sense…if it were true you could just set up links to all your competitors from nasty neighborhoods and wipe them out.
Response: True, true
Online Money Makin by Jason Fulton commented:
As you said you couldn’t control who links to you, your competitors might submit your site to a link farm and you don’t know it. Just don’t link to a link farm from your own site; Google is not a big fan of this.
Web Design Beach Commented:
Well, I agree with you. It would be totally insane if you could get hurt from bad incoming links, as everyone could make you pain. So I guess that there just less good incoming and better incoming link. It is with outgoing links. If you link to a site that is irrelevant you can just make harm to yourself, and that site wont get too much of the link juice.
Direct Web Sales Marketing by Dennis Edell commented:
“Although I am aware that the engines can penalize you for aggressive link building campaigns.”
Google punishes this for all those that think those truly idiotic “auto-linking” tools are good to use.
No people, 1000 links in 2 minutes is NOT a good thing. LOL
Indian Fry Bread Recipe by Bread commented:
Agree with the thought that income links can’t hurt you (much). Too easy to manipulate
Freddie Taylor by Freddie commented:
I don’t think an incoming link can be bad. As you said in the opener, you cannot control the incoming links, so how and why would Google put down a slap on your site.
Inspirational Guidance by Diane Corriette commented:
Is reciprocal linking with other relevant blogs still worth doing?
Response: A great post that goes more into depth on this topic is: “Reciprocal Links and Non-Reciprocal Links.” It gives a clear understanding of why you should do one over the other.
If I find 10 blogs that are similar and/or relevant and we link to each other is this a waste of time now?
Response: I would not recommend this strategy unless each of you are receiving a one way link from each other. If this strategy is done right, everyone should have 5 different backlinks to their website.
Is it all about the inbound link?
Response: Getting a lot of inbound links is important for getting up your link popularity to your website. The more quality and high page rank inbound links that you have coming into your site, the greater your Google page rank will be.
Online Cash Generator by Frank Carr
Google has made it clear several times in public statements that you can’t get penalized for sites linking to you. If that were true it would be possible to bring down a competitor by linking to them from known bad neighborhood sites.
Google does occasionally penalize for obvious massive linking campaigns but this is done manually with a lot of research before hand.
Well that is it for this edition of the holiday link love. Some of you might of commented to this and don’t see your link on this post, that is because I don’t feel that you added a beneficial comment to this post. I will continue to reward the people that post relevant comments to the site; it just creates a better atmosphere for everyone. Once again I appreciate all of the time that everyone has put into commenting to the sites and I will continue to provide quality post for you to read, so that you can learn all the techniques and strategies for you to create a successful blog or website.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I have a question related to this post, instead of using reciprocal links isn’t better to add another personal link and in this way you keep the visitors on your sites? In my case this helps me more than using this reciprocal links, because i have a better posibillity to expand all my sites.
This is a great question, but in this case I am simply providing resources from other related sites in order to receive a backlink from their site if they choose to accept the trackback to their site. In your case, I would recommend making those links nofollow so that you will not lose any link juice from your site
Thanks for sharing link love
. And thanks for making really interesting responses.
The best way to do the SEO promotion is to try to be as natural as possible. To much outflows like fast and hard link building can easily be detected by search engines and normally penalized. Natural website building and promotion will also be gratefully accepted by visitors.
Though one way links is much preferred because your websites will not share the link juice with other website because building too many reciprocal links may end up having too much outbound links, however, the factors that we look at as being the most important are link relevance and quality. A valuable link is more important!
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We had a penalty about 2-3 years ago for reciprocal linking. At the time, the real estate industry thought it ok to have ’state pages’ where we link to each other as a means to refer a potential home buyer to another agent in another state. Well, Google caught on and penalized scores of sites. Ours was penalized for about 2 months. I understand Google has now got algorithms in place to detect excessive reciprocal linking. Nowadays we only have 3-4 recips.
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