Can bad links hurt you

[webgator]

I am pretty new to this forum, so please bear with me if this has been asked numerous times. I was just wondering if bad sites linking to you can hurt your site in Google. We have a client we are working with that ranked really well for his main keywords in Google which are somewhat competitive. And I mean really well, as in top 5 placement for the last year or so, despite almost all the algorithm changes. However since about the middle of January those rankings have disappeared, even though the site is still in the index with a PR 2...it once had a PR 6. And now I discovered that they have hundreds of sites linking to them with PRO or PR1. Would that be the cause of their troubles or is there something else we should be loooking into. Thanks.

[John_Caius]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, webgator! :)

Pages linking to you should not adversely affect your ranking as this is out of your control. However, sites linked *from* you can affect your ranking. It would be worth checking that there are no small or hidden links out to what is described in these forums as a "link farm".

[Big_Balou]

Do you link back to any of these sites?

If not I'm of the opinion that it won't hurt you.

There has been a lot of discussion on the subject and if you use the site search, in the links at the top of the page, you'll find a number of these discussions.

<added>Welcome to Webmaster World!</added>

[edited by: Big_Balou at 3:16 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2003]

[Mike_Mackin]

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

[google.com...]

[webgator]

I found one link from their site to a "bad site", one using a Zeus link directory. Is that enough to reduce the site to PR 2? Also, we designed the site so there shouldn't be any hidden links. One thing else I noticed is that while our clients homepage is a PR 2, the internal pages are PR 0, and this isn't a new site. Is that unusual or have we done something else wrong.

Thanks

[JayC]

they have hundreds of sites linking to them with PRO or PR1.

Sounds like at least some of those sites (some may be interrelated) recently had their PageRank reduced. Are they primarily links pages?

So less PR is passing through to your client's site. It's not really surprising to find an indicated PR0 on internal pages of a site with a PR2 on the index page; it's probably not a result of a penalty being applied directly to the site.

The solution: find new, legitimate links -- those are the ones that will last a long time.

[John_Caius]

Here's your problem:

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