A Site Links to Me Over 6800 Times - does this help or hurt?

[underglass]

Hi,

In WMT, I see a related (to my niche) blog linking to me ("small blue widgets") in their right nav. They have nearly 7000 pages with the same right nav. The blog has Google Ads and affiliate links on page and embedded in text. Their homepage is PR1.

How should I handle this? Should I ask them to no follow or remove? Or, since I do not have very many one-way links pointing to me, leave it be? And, what do you do if there is no way to contact them?

Your advice is appreciated!

[Pjman]

I'd say leave it alone. Google can't punish you for links that are out of your control. When they penalize sites, they look for systemic patterns. 1 site site with a bunch of links isn't a pattern.

Now if you had like 10 sites doing that to you, I would take some action.

[bhartzer]

I agree with Pjman, I wouldn't really do anything at this point. If you have seen a big decrease in rankings around the time that the site put those links to you on their site then that would be another story.

I would, though, do a more thorough backlink analysis of your site, including looking at all of the anchor text of the links, to make sure that there's nothing else there that looks "unnatural".

[bramley]

I doubt much weight is given to the number of links per site, just the number of sites than link to one.

[underglass]

Now if you had like 10 sites doing that to you, I would take some action.

Nope, none of that.

I would, though, do a more thorough backlink analysis of your site, including looking at all of the anchor text of the links, to make sure that there's nothing else there that looks "unnatural".

Will do.

Thank you everyone. You put my mind at ease.

[FranticFish]

This is only speculation, but blogrolls are so common that I'd be surprised if Google didn't count them as one link of varying strength (based on number of pages indexed and the strength of those pages) rather than lots of different links.

People get added to blogrolls on huge blogs all the time. New links are part of the web. So as long as you objectively think that this is a good link to have then there is no need to be concerned in my view.

[underglass]

So as long as you objectively think that this is a good link to have then there is no need to be concerned in my view.

I am trying to be objective. I am not crazy about it but will leave it alone for awhile.

[Robert Charlton]

This is speculation...

I assume that there'd be no problem if the blogroll doesn't appear to be manipulative, ie, if the links are all to professional peers and to related sites, if the anchor text is to site or company name, and if the linking blog is a good quality site.

On the other hand, if the blogroll contains some stuff that looks like it's selling links, eg, keyword-keyword links, links to off-topic casino sites, pills, etc etc, and if the linking site is of questionable quality, then I think you should be more concerned.

IMO, run-of-site links generally indicate that links are given because of special relationships between sites, not freely given editorial links. It's possible for blogroll links to be votes for quality, though, and it's likely that Google considers this. Again, the quality of the linking blog is a factor.

Some years back, it was widely discussed that Google maintained a quality score for backlink profiles, a theory I tended to believe and still do. I think that percentages of low vs high quality backlinks do matter.

Since you say you don't have very many good inbounds, it's therefore more likely that these particular blogroll links, if low quality, might hurt you. How that factors into the current algorithm, which seems to look at overall site quality signals, is hard to say. It's not anything that Google has announced... it's not new in Panda... but it's certainly one of many measures that Google might use.