adding off-topic to my site

will linking to my other pages help or hurt?

[rich42]

I've recently been adding a number of pages to my site not related to my main SEO topic. They are related to some non-work stuff the company sponsors.

The pages will maybe total 15% of my site when I'm done.

I'm hoping to utilize these pages from an SEO standpoint by having some links on them back to my 'focus' pages with appropriate anchor text.

It seems reasonable this won't help as much as on-topic content would.

Will this help at all?

Could this hurt me?

Thoughts?

[goodroi]

You answered yourself. "It seems reasonable this won't help as much as on-topic content would" On topic is better than off topic, but a page is a page and link is a link. So the more pages of unique content you create are helpful. Links from different pages and sites are also good. The only way it could hurt is if you start adding duplicate content or content stolen from another site (I doubt this is the case).

A better question to ask yourself is whether your time is better spent harvesting links or adding pages to your site?