Content related links vs Non Content related links

the impact of putting non-content related reciprocal links

[funsapple]

I am new to webmaster job. The more link exchange, the more popularity and more potential traffic comes.
However, may i know is there any disadvantages if we putting the non-content related reciprocal link at the link pages?
For example: My site is about the currency trading. So, do the finance related sites (credit card, loan, banking,etc) help for my ranking? Besides that, Do the SEO, travel, shopping, hosting website, pharmacy, education related websites help for the ranking or traffic?
Appreciate everyone who can advise..

cheers
shirley

[DXL]

From my understanding, getting links from any site with quality traffic will help, but your emphasis should be on getting links from sites related to your own site.

[funsapple]

Thanks. So how about keep those non-related link under the link site? will they harm our search engine ranking?

[AuthorityDomains]

I would suggest staying away fron non-related sites and trying to find links only from related sites. Also, stay away from the obvious "spam" industries, such as pharmacy, casino, etc.

[Valleycommando]

Tends to be two types of links. Those for traffic,
and out of a sense of duty, which tend to appear on php link directories. Submit your URl here

And the tactical links which you normally have to beg, buy or promise or blackmail. These are on pages
that are high PR on the toolbar, and have few outgoing. These are the ones that act like whaleing harpoons and pull you through the serps.

The other sort will get you penalised. I know, it just happened to me on msn. I swoppped poor links with the world, as as a result had 40% of the listings
for actually quite a competitive keyword. Silly as I was already position 1 3 5
Sigh. Don't bother with the low ones. It's spam.

Bad ones that will get you into trouble are anything that is 18 rated. gambling, porn, alcohol, smokes, medications, drugs etc
4 links on a high PR empty page are better than 40,000 submits

[cmarket]

Just a quick note of importance.

Ranking is not as important as getting visitors.

So strategic links from seemingly unrelated sites can make extremely good business sense.

For example, I run a UK specific personal finance website <snip> and I have recently placed a link on a dog breeders website.

You may think I'm mad but my site offers pet insurance.

Now my pet insurance page has risen to 14th out of my 30 top referral pages!

If the search engines want to penalize me for having links from 'seemingly' unrelated websites (because I intend to get more) then I firmly believe they are out of line.

What's more, the more visitors your site gets, the more some search engines like it...

So with regard to links from unrelated sites, if it gets visitors, who cares what the search engines think!

But I would definately avoid link farms, linking with adult, gambling, drug, hate, 'directory' sites that are just link farms...etc. You get the idea.

[edited by: sugarrae at 3:39 pm (utc) on Mar. 25, 2006]
[edit reason] No urls per the TOS. Thanks. [/edit]

[sugarrae]

>>>search engines want to penalize me for having links from 'seemingly' unrelated websites

A link from a pet website to a pet insurance webpage is not unrelated. Not to the human eye and not to a search engine "eye". A pet site linking to a site selling Viagara would be unrelated. The search engines are fairly smart.