Hundreds of links

Rubbish sites linking to mine!

[beckyc]

I run a website for a UK-based animal charity.

The owner and myself have spent time getting good quality links back to the site.

I did a link:// test in Google this morning and found literally hundreds of junk pages linking to us. Things from tacky icon websites (smilies) through to foreign indecipherable sites.

Is this going to harm our website?

And why are they linking to us?!

[Blackie]

Since you do not have any controll of "who is linking you" you never get penalized for this. So no worries. They actually help you build up your PageRank :-)

[asheldon]

The reason why they link to your site is to try to increase the usefulness and value of their own sites/pages to google's eyes.

Lately, it's been suggested that competitors can knock each others off by doing massive link campaigns to trigger a google filter. However, I doubt that other charities are doing this to harm your site!

It should not harm you.

[spaceylacie]

It won't harm you a bit, no matter how bad the sites are. Search engines have some kind of algo thing going on and they can tell if you've asked to be linked or if the site has just linked to you.

For real, don't worry about it, it'll actually help your site.

[beckyc]

Excuse the ignorance but how will the algo 'know'?

Is it down to the way anchor text, description text is listed within a link?

When I ask for links I always provide a link title, description etc.

[mblair]

spaceylacie, really? I've seen a lot posted about the dangers of being linked from "bad neighborhoods" but don't recollect the details -- do you think Google discounts these links if there is no reciprocation? My fear would be that Google may assume some of these are paid links and that that in combination with other "signals" such as over-optimized on-page content might cause some dampering in the SERPs.

[martinibuster]

>>>My fear would be that Google may assume some of these are paid links...

That is a valid fear. If Google automates the proces there is always the possibility of being accidentally caught in the net as collateral damage.

Although currently, I don't see Google automatically catching paid links, although I have seen some sites lose their ability to pass pr and the beneficiaries lose their positions or be penalized in some manner. I wouldn't worry about this.

Also, Google's admonition is to not link to bad neighborhoods.

[larryhatch]

I did a Yahoo search for linkdomain:mysite.net and found 1600 links to my little niche site,
which is amazing really.

Most of them are pure trash of course. Many are just rip-offs of DMOZ, others are just scraping one another. I don't much care.

As long as _some_ major sites in my field see fit to link my way, I'm glad for it.
The junk links probably don't count for much, but they can't hurt much either. - Larry

[helleborine]

Boatloads of scraper sites link to my site.

My site publishes free "widget plans" for example, "giraffe widget plans" "grape widget plans" and "catholic widget plans."

Guess what? I have links in scraper pages about giraffes, grapes and Catholics.

Multiply that with the number of "widget plans" I offer... it's staggering. But I get minuscule traffic from these pages, and the few visitors tend not to spend time on my site.

As to the effect it has on my ranking... I cannot tell, I do not know!

[obono]

I got one site linked from adult pages which were nothing but spam pages with no more information on it than hundreds of links next to each other. It was even hard to find mine. Included, there were links to other non-adult domains that for sure never intended to be on that page, like my site. Why is this happening if it causes no harm as everybody suggests?

Martinibuster, what could be a bad neighborhood to Google eyes if you want to risk a definition?

Could online pharmacy, gambling and adult sites be bad neighbors automatically? Or the condition of bad is being comprised of technical factors, like networks of pages that use too much spam techniques (keywords, crosslinking, etc) regardless of their niche.

Or is it something subjective to google quality engineers' point of view? Example, you link your highly reputable .org domain to an adult blog. Then, engineers decide this should not happen and penalize the action... thus, it falls under the 'veil' of a bad neighborhood relationship.