Hey everyone,
sorry to bring this topic up again, but the current weekly newsletter from Developer Shed confused me here: In the article about what to avoid when building links, the authors list several good points, but some points conflict with what we discussed last week about links hurting your rankings or not.
Staying away from link farms and not looking for links from unrelated sites is good advice and can be interpreted along the line of 'It won't help you enough, so don't waste your time on it'.
But the authors say other things that seem to conflict with the strong statement 'Backlinks can never hurt you!!!' which I was told last week:
"You don’t really want to be part of a directory whose only criteria for admitting you is having a live link."
"If one approaches you and asks to link to you, just say no."
"If you own an ordinary e-commerce site, you really don’t want to have a link on a site that is oriented to sex or gambling."
So, are the authors of the Developer Shed newsletter giving out false advice? What they say here sounds to me like: "You don't want those links!" instead of "Don't invest time into getting those links".
Backlinks will never hurt. That is very much true. Otherwise it would be too easy to take out the competition. You get into trouble with links when you are part of a link farm. By participating (i.e. lining to them in exchange for getting links back) you are admitting to be a part of it and then the hammer drops.
Rule of thumb: seek quality links from related sites and don't worry about the other links. Also, don't link to sites that aren't related or don't offer any value to your users.
"Back-links can never hurt" only when you are linking to related and Theme based sites.
"Back-links can never hurt" only when you are linking to related and Theme based sites.
In that case it is not the backlink that hurts but it is the outgoing link as that is what flags your site as being part of a link farm or other scheme. Otherwise any backlink from such sites can't affect you.
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