Re: SEO Site Linking
 

You just don't get it, do you.

If a web site has incoming links from spammy sources, it will suffer from losing authenticity and credibility with the major search engines, whether it is the SEO's fault or not.

One of the responsibilities an ethical SEO has when working on a web site is to extract the web site from the clutches of an unsavoury linking past and to avoid the temptation of gaining inbound links using a haphazardly approach or with a careless attitude. The obsession to gain incoming links is driven by a common SEO misunderstanding. Any attempt to artificially increase a web site's importance by acquiring unearned links to the web site is an attempt at search engine manipulation.

Search engine optimizers, web site designers and website developers should concentrate on crafting the highest caliber, uniquely important content possible rather than chasing links. There is a huge difference in skill needed between being and SEO and being a linking strategist. Most link strategists think they are performing SEO when they chase links, but they are not.

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

My personal belief is that a site will not suffer if every so often a bad neighborhood links to them, especially if the number of "bad" links is far outweighed by the number of high quality backlinks. As a site becomes more well known and mainstream, it can only be expected that a wide array of quality and non-quality sites link to them.

However, if only bad neighborhoods link to a particular site, or the majority of backlinks a site has are from hundreds of free-for-all link pages, then it could be assumed by the SEs that this site travels in the wrong circles.

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

You don't understand how the Internet works, huh? That statement is 100% incorrect and it is easy to understand why.

1) You can't stop people from linking to you. It's impossible.

2) Why would Google penalize a site for what someone else does? That the site owner has absolutely no control over? Seriously. Have you even thought about that for a minute? If Google did that then everyone would be out to sabotage their competitors and they would all succeed. The search results would be a mess and irrelevant (and only showing people who haven't yet been attacked). That's why the worst thing an incoming link can do is nothing. That's why all links are not created equal.

3) That's why outbound linking can be harmful because the webmaster controls that. By linking to a bad site (the reason why the site is "bad" is irrelevant) the website owner is acknowledging their participation in it and thus is is fair and right to punish them.

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

I certainly would not test that theory on any web project that I am working on.

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

You don't have to. It's been proven over and over again. The only people who need to worry are those who actively participate in such schemes. But they never succeed anyway.

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

I still believe that if the vast majority of sites that link to you are just bad neighborhoods, it could have an ill effect on your rankings. One reason: Because if the site was legitimate, there would at least be SOME real backlinks in the mix, or enough to make the site known to competitors who want to sabotage it. If all backlinks are spammy, that means that the site has no real backlinks at all, and no content worthy of backlinks (and competitors probably don't know about the site to care to sabotage it), meaning it was most likely the site owner who got their own site involved in bad neighborhoods. Just my take on it.

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

Even then it wouldn't matter. If you only have crappy sites linking back to your site you won't rank well for anything anyway. So there is no need to apply a penalty. Plus if that were true then a competitor can bring down a website simply through sheer quantity of bad links. Once, again, that is completely beyond the control of the webmaster and cannot be held against them.

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

... cannot be held against them ...

Man, you are living in a fairy tale world. I don't care how wonderfully optimized a web site is, if it has a significant amount of incoming links from unreliable or pre-determined bad linking neighbourhoods, it will suffer. It doesn't matter whose fault it is.

One of the first things to do when removing penalties from a web site is to shake off as many of these bad incoming links as possible. Ever try that? Not fun but well worth the rewards.

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

Sorry, forgot to mention this.

Google :

" Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query. "

www google com/technology/index html

Re: SEO Site Linking
 

You're not using common sense and that is all you need to grasp the concept. If this was true what would stop people from using this to sabotage their competition? I expect an answer.

Congratulations. You just figured out that Google uses incoming links and other off site factors to rank web pages. Now you're not 10 years behind every one else.