I want to let it be known that not everything you read on blogs will be accurate. What is more disturbing is the blogs that might be written by “popular” people, can often be viewed as true facts. I don’t think that people purposely release incorrect information, I just think they try hard to give great articles and sometimes stretch the content further than need be. I definitely am not here to say I know everything about everything, but when it comes to linking, we have been around the block enough to know what is not correct.
Tonight I read a blog post about “Google Filters and how to get around them” and there was some good info here and there, but I definitely would debate some of the link info given.
CO-citation Linking Filter: This popular filter by Google watches your inbound link structure. If your link is on a site who’s outbound links are related to casino’s and porn sites and your automotive site is an outbound link on this site then google will think your site is related to porn and casinos. Poorly constructed co-citation will damage your ranking and make it hard for you to rank well for the terms you are targeting.
This quote from the article referenced is absolutely crazy. Let me paint the picture of why it is so wrong. We were recently at Pubcon in Vegas and Matt Cutt’s was speaking about linking. He brought up the thought that inbound links can’t hurt you. He gave the example of porn sites that have the initial home page that makes you agree to the terms, you agree and proceed into the porn pages or you disagree and it redirects you to disney.com. What he explained is, there is no way they could penalize disney.com because some porn site decided to link to them. The only way disney.com could be frowned upon is if they returned the link back to that porn site. It would show a relationship between the two.
I believe the author of this post was giving good Google filter information, but it definitely was not all accurate information. When it comes to inbound links, you can NOT be penalized because of links that point to you if there is no reciprocal link!. If this was true, then all anyone would have to do is put bad links to their competition. Google can not count a link, but they will not put a penalty on anyone because of an inbound link they have no control over.
5 comments ↓
Quote: “you can NOT be penalized because of links that point to you if there is no reciprocal link”
This was my exact thought after reading the “CO-citation Linking Filter”. Inbound links from websites you have no control over cannot and will not hurt your ranking. Even Google says so:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34449&topic=8524
I think this is a nice example of the so-called “SEO Experts” who don’t even take the time to read Google guidelines/answers
No thanks Mr Whyte, but I will be my own SEO Consultant!
Hey Klemen,
I always say “Stick to what you know best!!”
if inbound links mattered insofar as filtering you ‘out’ of the search engines, than i could easily knock my competitors out of the top 10 or top 100 by having linkfarms and porn sites point to their automotive page.
We have utilized a Link Exchange tool for our sites for about 2 years now and to be honest, we rarely find a qualified partner that we will return a link to. The benefit though, is that the Link Exchange sites are automated, so we may have 100 porn, casino or meds sites submit link exchanges to us on a given day. 90 out of 100 will remove out link within 30 days or so because we, obviously, will not link back to them. the other 10, however, will not catch the fact that we just chose not to include them in our directory and may end up leaving our link up. (Why does this happen? : My theory is that the link exchange program spiders are not 100% accurate)… This works out great for us, because we may earn anywhere from 1 to 10 backlinks on a given day without having to do anything except pay $19.95 a month for the service.
That being said, i know that the backlinks are not necessarily relevant, especially if we have a health site with links to us from a porn site. But, the fact of the matter is, that the webmaster of the porn site could very well have found my health information interesting and may have pointed a legit link to me and “voted” for my site (Googlocracy). Just because my site is not porn doesn’t mean google will completely discount the link. If nothing else, they will give that a link a ‘minimum score’ (whatever that means).
I guess what i am getting at, is that so long as you don’t point back to the porn site, the link from them can do nothing but help. (Unless it is an obvious Google ID’d linkfarm or crapsite.
In closing — I’d like to welcome all porn, casino and illegal meds sites to point as many links to my websites as they’d like. I won’t, however, point crap to you in return… Hey, at least i’m honest
Thanks.
MegaD
ps.–> disregard spelling and grammer errors — i didn’t feel like proofreading this morning, and i’ve only had 2 espressos at this point.
You misspelled your name.
If damage could be done to others` sites by linking in to them I`m sure by now there would be an industry thriving around it.
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