Links from irrelavant sites

good, bad, or doesn't matter

[tkroll]

I've been reading a lot on here lately. I think too much information is often, well, TOO MUCH!

Please help me get to the bottom of this:
Will links from a site irrelavant to my keywords hurt me?

My friends are linking to my commercial site from their personal homepages. I read something about Google maybe seeing these as being from a link farm? This wouldn't make any sense as I have no control over who links to me.

I think I'm misguided. Please reassure me that I am!

Thanks

[ciml]

Relevance doesn't affect PageRank. There's widely held belief that Google will add a weighting for link context, but GoogleGuy's recent comment [webmasterworld.com] must poor some doubt on that.

[rfgdxm1]

I don't think that Google has the technological ability to determine if links were to irrelevant sites. What if hypothetically a major folk music site linked to a site about some very obscure folk music artist, who only had one fan site about them? How would Googlebot know this obscure person was a folk musician to count the link? Just because Googlebot can't recognize the connection between the 2 sites doesn't mean there isn't one.

[John_Creed]

That would not be considered a link farm. Those links are fine.

[rfgdxm1]

Good point John_Creed. For this to be a link farm, you'd have to be linking back to all your friends sites. As a practical matter, why wouldn't someone running a commercial site ask their friends to link to them? Sending potential customers your way sounds like good business.

[birdstuff]

My experience has shown that there is no such thing as an irrelevent link if you use good anchor text and an accurate description. I have dozens of links from "off-topic" sites (some reciprocal, some not). My pages have decent PR and my home page comes up #1 for several competitive keywords and phrases. I get a considerable amount of traffic from these "off topic" sites and those visitors convert just as well as my "on-topic" traffic.

I believe that if you give the user a complete and accurate description, he'll click through if he's interested in what you have to offer (info or products, it doesn't matter). Just because someone sees your link on a site that sells red widgets doesn't automatically mean he isn't looking for your green widgets. And Google doesn't seem to care one way or the other.