What type of link hurts your site's rankings?

[Emilio]

Nowadays to get quality backlinks is very difficult but you can easily get spammy links or low quality links. My question is what type of link hurts your Site's Rankings?

Does it have any guidelines for avoid bad backlinks?

 

[ericplotz1]

Yes links with 0 link profile can hurt your site by diluting the links you have going to your site. I had a site that was on the 1st page and accidentally pointed 200 links, mixture of contextual and profile links, and killed my TF and the site is still struggling to get back up again.

You also don't want links with an irrelevant profile.

I bought a PR4 home page link once. The site looked decent and somewhat relevant but the link profile was all French and completely irrelevant. This impacted the site negatively as soon as the page where the content with link was published was indexed.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

I have had the exact opposite experience. I buy domains with irrelevant link profiles every day and build network sites off of them. The links work just fine. Much better than fine actually.

You mentioned profile links. That is much more likely an issue than irrelevant link profiles. Profile links were one of the first types of links that Google targeted. In May of 2011, Google sent out 750,000+ warnings through Google Webmaster Tools for unnatural links. These warnings were mostly traced back to profile links.

 

[Hawker]

Nowadays to get quality backlinks is very difficult but you can easily get spammy links or low quality links. My question is what type of link hurts your Site's Rankings?

Does it have any guidelines for avoid bad backlinks?

It's not very difficult. It's not even difficult. If you think getting quality links is very difficult then you simply just don't know how to get them.

It's not easy or very easy though yes, but it never is easy when you don't know. It's only when you know that it becomes easy.

And its true what they say in that "nothing worth having is ever easy to come by".

There is a wealth of information out there on top SEO blogs and forums like this one that give much clear advice on what counts for a quality link.

In a nutshell a quality link is a link from a site that is RELATED to the niche your site is in.

Then Google looks at the age of that link, the age of the site the link is on, the links pointing to that site the link is on, its on-page SEO etc.

Getting that right is tricky but not difficult if you're in a fairly big or broad niche.

There is no particular link that will harm your site on its own, it's when you have too much of one thing and not enough of the other.

Example: Nooby webmaster builds 100,000 forum profile links only to his site but has no social signals, no citations, no contextual links etc or any kind of related links from sites/blogs/forums etc in his niche.

That raises flags and sticks out like a sore thumb.

It's all about diversity, having links/referrals/citations etc from virtually everywhere. But the more that are related to your niche the better.

That said, there are some places you will want to avoid building links on, these are as Eric basically said, unrelated profile urls are about the worst you can get and in fact are the number 1 choice for people who wish to do negative SEO on other peoples sites. It's a sure-fire way to get a site either sandboxed or worse, penalised.

Mind you, some people consider them to be the same thing. Personally, I'd rather be sandboxed any day than penalized.

Not even Google WMT Disavow tool can handle 1,000,000 links and you can buy that as cheap as a bag of chips these days by some slumdog somewhere.

But Google has to be careful as well, because Google knows that some sites can go "viral" overnight and amass millions of backlinks, citations etc etc over night or quickly.

And it either penalizes that site or it sand boxes it. Some people say that the sand box doesn't really exist. And in effect it doesn't, there is no virtual space that they put your site into, they simply put a marker on it and while that's on it wont show in SERP's. You have to work hard to get a site out of sand box and sometimes it can take years and there's still no guarantee.

So yeah, IMHO, the types of links that can "hurt your rankings" are anything mass created that you could not do yourself by hand in one day and that are on sites that are not even related to your niche.

Regardless to the platform they are on.

Hope that helps!

 

[vishwa]

Nowadays to get quality backlinks is very difficult but you can easily get spammy links or low quality links. My question is what type of link hurts your Site's Rankings?

Does it have any guidelines for avoid bad backlinks?

I think you already have answered your question. As you say low and spammy links which can get easily can hurt your SEO and also your site rankings.

 

[bacloud]

Links in links farms or other non natural links it bad places.

 

[Nimit Suri]

Links or url with low page rank can harm your site . Also be beware of duplicate ips when u do directory submission for your website .A lot of websites create different url with the same ips which are just irrelevant. You can search for ip checkers online and then compare the websites.I personally do that.Cuz submitting your business details in directories across the same ips is also considered to be spam.Build links with websites having a good domain age and page rank.You can also install the page rank checker in your toolbar.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

This is total nonsense. Links do not, nor have they ever, harmed a site because they are on pages with low PR.

And considering that the PR data has not been updated publicly by Google in over two years, you have no idea what the PR is on any page on the internet right now anyhow.

 

[karmadir]

Avoid Directory Submission and meaningless article directories for a time being.

 

[Nimit Suri]

You mite want to check the page rank toolbar .I am guessing you mite have.So is that useless too?
OR is it just created to show fake page ranks of the website?

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

The data showed in the Page Rank Toolbar has not been updated since December of 2013.

 

[samimnoorzaitgc]

Google Stoped updating pagrank toolbar

You mite want to check the page rank toolbar .I am guessing you mite have.So is that useless too?
OR is it just created to show fake page ranks of the website?

Have you read this post [URLnf="http://searchengineland.com/google-toolbar-pagerank-finally-officially-dead-205277"]here[/URLnf]
Google won't consider updating pagerank anymore.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Actually, they update it every single day. They always have. They just are no longer publicly sharing data.

 

[softnwords]

I do not think links from Low PR site affects my site PR.The main reason that your links from some irrelevant site niche then it may hurt you.suppose you are having a site that promotes medicine and you get links from sites that promotes books then it is severe hurt for your site

 

[expmrb]

- Links from irrelevant sources. Such as links which comes from irrelevant pages which have nothing similar to your linking page.
- Links whose anchor texts are irrelevant to surrounding content of the hosting page or links which have similar anchor texts to the hosting page but the linked page is irrelevant to the linked page.
- Links from link exchange schemes or links wheels.
- Links from low quality guest posts. Which does not add any value but just built to get a do-follow link from the hosting page.
- Links Low quality article submission sites.

 

[khassani]

Nowadays to get quality backlinks is very difficult but you can easily get spammy links or low quality links. My question is what type of link hurts your Site's Rankings?

Does it have any guidelines for avoid bad backlinks?

I would say links coming from private blog networks, which actually is severely punished by Google. Placing backlinks on web directories and press releases sites is considered to be low quality linkbuilding but I don't think it will harm your rankings.

 

[Hawker]

Hawker

:think: Can you tell me why you think links from PBN's would get you punished? The whole point of a PBN is to keep them safe so as to avoid a penalty in the first place. You must be doing something seriously wrong if your PBN's are getting your sites penalized or perhaps you have used some link farms and mistaken them for a PBN?

Also if you ONLY placed links on directories and press release sites only and done it in a spammy way, used low quality content, too many too fast etc while not getting any other type of backlink on any other platform, then that can raise flags and can indeed harm your rankings, especially if Google sandboxes your site, you can be stuck in the sandbox for years.

New sites/businesses naturally pick up press releases so usually get a bunch of them from the start. Big established businesses have press releases written about them all the time but they already are authority sites with tons of backlinks from just about every platform and site you can think of.

Directory links can harm your ranking if you are a new site and go and submit 10,000 links to some generic directories. But getting them gradually overtime as is NATURAL and hand submitted to the CORRECT category can improve your rankings. Directories are editorial meaning they are human moderated and Google likes anything that is human moderated.

 

[khassani]

khassani

Hi Hawker,

With regards to PBN's, no matter how safe you think you are with them, Google is constantly updating its search algorithm to detect them. I have worked with some SEO agencies who used PBN's to build links, at first the rankings seemed to progress really well but eventually they dropped dramatically (The only explanation is that Google detected the links as coming from PBN's). Not to mention that it is considered to be a black hat method

 

[ridgley]

I could say that links from low quality sites that is not related to my niche.

 

[jagdish pathare]

hi emilio

The site ranking there is both types of link hurts. Like inbound and outbound link

Google related link operated is give relevant link for your site, blog, article etc. if you can use google related link operated. It’s give you which types of likes for relevant your site, blog according to google.

According to google get your site links is help to rank and improving your site, blog etc. better content your site and blog (seo friendly content).

 

[HCFGrizzly]

Nowadays to get quality backlinks is very difficult but you can easily get spammy links or low quality links. My question is what type of link hurts your Site's Rankings?

Does it have any guidelines for avoid bad backlinks?

Spam...spam never changes. It`s not so hard to avoid bad backlinks. Just don`t spam every website you can get your hands on and you should be fine