The Jumblog

Everyone has heard about SEO - Key Word Content, PageRank, link building, etc… I get asked about the link portion all the time and one question came up again this week.

The main theory is to get your web site as many inbound links from other sites that are A) relevant to your own site content and B) from sites that have higher PageRank or considered better/stronger sites than yourself. So the question that comes after this explanation is always - Do links from bad  or weaker sites hurt my own site optimization?

The generic answer is that they will not, however in certain situations this needs to be qualified.  Almost every site is going to have some links pointing to them from sites that are not as strong, this is common and may not have anything to do with the site receiving the link.

However, there are situations where these links will make a difference; the two that stand out the most are if these “bad” links are a large percentage of the total of your overall links, and also how they actually point to you.

The main rule to follow with linking:

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck - it is probably a duck!

If a link looks like it is “overly” optimized, or weirdly manipulated for a reason, or aquired in some “black hat” fashion… then it will look that way to Google as well.

The moral of the story is, there are plenty of ways to find quality links and raise your profile so there is no reason to do this. Just work smart and hard at your linking plan, stay on it consistently, and you will see the results.