Can linking hurt my site?

[BBB_Guy]

Hello,
Let say someone with the kind of spammy, totally unrelevant site is linking to my site. Its a one way link, im not linking back. Can this hurt my ranking in google?

[Dreamquick]

On the whole I'd say that you shouldn't recieve a penalty if it is just a one way link from them to you. If this thing was penalised I'm sure that a lot more people would be using it to knock their competitors out of their current position.

There may be exceptions to this rule but I think the only ones who know for sure all work in the GooglePlex. :)

- Tony

[antrat]

It's extremely unlikley that a link *to* your site will do any harm. Just be careful who *you* link to, but don't worry about who links to you as it's not possible to reverse engineer a site.

[nakulgoyal]

Yes, A one way link can never penalize u/.....the credit for that link might be removed by web bots to your website, but you wont be penalized.

This is like the guestbooks things...people used to use a lot of guestbook links....and when this started to penalize, people started to add guestbook links to their competitors...and when this was felt, since then I dont feel anybody ever got penalized for a one way link!