Can I block someone from linking to me?

[TRex]

I'm playing around with Google to investigate why my organic listings have been dropping. My indexed pages have been decreasing which is worrysome, but when I did link:www.mydomain.com -site:www.mydomain.com all I was left with was a link from an adult site! There are quite a few other sites that link to mine (relevant, non-adult ones), why are they not showing up? I don't want to be associate with this adult site either - is there a way I can tell them not to link to me?

[kaled]

The link: command in Google is rubbish - ignore it.

A few basic links from adult sites will not affect your rankings in any way, except that your PR may benefit slightly which might have a marginal affect on SERPS.

There are many causes of pages being dropped.

1) Take a random sampling of a few pages that have been dropped and scrutinize them carefully (source code). Look for validation errors, bad links, empty links, hidden text, etc. Correct any mistakes. Don't assume that pages that are still indexed are faultless.
2) Google page-hijacking. It's possible that you're a victim of this but don't jump to this conclusion.
3) Look through old threads - there are many on this subject.

Also, check and validate your robots.txt file - it's not a likely cause but this only takes a moment so do it anyway.

Kaled.

[Komodo_Tale]

The standard SEO advice and belief right now is that you will not be penalized for any links from other domains to your domain. Links from other domins to your domains that have been deemed suspect may be discounted by a search engine, but that only means that you will receive neither a benefint nor a penalty.

[TRex]

Thanks! I've been looking through some of the threads and have been picking up lots from them. I feel a bit like a new mom with a crying baby - will it be fine if I leave it or is there a huge problem! lol.
I've checked the robots.txt and saw that it needed some minor updates and am checking out the meta tags as we speak.
You guys rock, Thanks

[phpdude]

Drop this in your .htaccess file

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "theblockedsite.com" BadReferrer
order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=BadReferrer
deny from 123.23.111.111 (blocked sites IP number)

[tedster]

Yes, you can block the hotlinking from actually sending you traffic. But the search engines will still see the links, and so will the visitors to the other sites. Nothing you can do about that unless the other site cooperates with your request that they voluntarily remove the link.