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4.5 Quality of links

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As I already said, with links sites kind of vote for each other, and some "votes" are more trusted by Search Engines than others. This is what we call different link quality.

Like, when you ask for advice on to which nursery to take your kid, you'll better trust Maggie who's got three kids of her own, rather than Charles, who's a bachelor of 47 years, never had children and only heard about nurseries from his friends.

So here's my offpage optimization advice #1:

Always think of the quality of links you're getting.

And I'll give you tips that'll help you get only premium quality links.

4.6 Avoid link farms and FFA sites

There're hundreds of such websites that promise you SEO wonders, but I'll tell you how it all works.

FFA (Free For All) sites and link farms are pretty much alike: FFA're special sites where anyone can drop a link — and a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. You can be tempted by a promise of "10,000 FFA links" and you may even really get these 10,000 links, hoping that your site will look very "popular". But instead, you get nothing but bad neighborhood.

If you look at the sites at link farms, you'll see most of them are spammy: they sell Viagra or show porn and so on. Google often acts like a human being: it'll think if you "hang out" with these "bad guys", you're pretty much the same. The quality of links you can get at link farms is most often so bad that Search Engines stop trusting you and may even simply kick you out of their indexes due to membership in a link farm.

Therefore, stay away from FFAs and link farms and try to build good quality links — and build them at the right pace. Sure, it takes longer to get a high quality link, but the results are worth the effort.

In the next chapter I'll tell you how quality links are built. And right now, I'll let you know, what a good link is made of.

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25 comments

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2009-10-22 16:25:43: Enson Arantes

Hi there,

I was wonder if the case is like this.
first, we link to another website say X, this X website is from the same niche as our website, then this X website link to another website from FFA or Link Farm categories, and on this case let says search engine punish this X website for "being friend" with Bad neighbourhood, will this case affect my website as well?, as in the end, even come from the same niche, but this X website already become a FFA/LinkFarm family.

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2010-09-06 13:09:38: Make Money at Home

Is this a 3 way linking?

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2009-10-23 03:40:03: Watch Naruto Online

We still have to careful to have a good quality of links,right?
Let say i want to make a link exchange with XXXX site.This site has a top level at google search engine.But not all website that has a top level at google has a good page rank or maybe the website was penalized by google.

and when we make link with the page that has penalty from google this can effect our website too.it is true??

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2009-10-23 09:16:40: Dan Richmond


1) If a website has a top ranking, can hardly be a penalized site.
2) Google PageRank is not the only thing to look at when getting links.

and when we make link with the page that has penalty from google this can effect our website too.it is true??

The chances to get any problems are normally pretty small anyway, as it will hardly be more than just a couple of links, when you have at least 100s of them. I'd say, try to avoid linking to bad neighborhood sites, but don't get obsessed with this idea.

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2009-11-05 00:57:25: Larry Kenebrew Jr.

Good advice. I was going to try a link farm. I'm glad I read this.

Larry of Myspace Layouts

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2009-12-28 07:37:08: waseem qamar

Hi Dan,
I am using http://www.gotlinks.com free services (link exchange) for backlinks. Is it good for SEO or bad?

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2010-01-21 02:23:40: Victor Wallace

I have to disagree with this SEO guidance.

I mean think about it.....

I agree that outward bound links from your site to "bad neighborhoods" are very bad your sites reputation from Google's point of view - the qualification here is that I am the website owner and as such have absolute control over what happens on my site and where any outbound links point and there I am and should be held accountable for them.

However the context here is about inbound links.

Google DOES NOT penalize a website for the links inbound to any site ! Why ? well quite simply no website owner can control inbound links.

If this was a serious ranking factor then unscrupulous webmasters could very easy damage a competitors site by simply arranging for lots of bad links to be directed to a competitive site, lets face it these types of links are very very cheap to procure your can get an Indian SEO to do a lot of this type of work for a few hundred dollars.

This is the way that you should view inbound links....

There are a spectrum of good links of variable value and then there are links that have NO value.

Link farms have zero value and whatever time or money you spend on them is money wasted as they are simply of no value, not good not bad nothing.



















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2010-01-22 10:53:37: Dan Richmond

@Victor Wallace

I am not talking about a "penalty" here. But the fact remains: if you have a lot of "bad" backlinks, this may have a negative effect on your ranking. Here's a posting in Google's official blog that discusses the problem with bad neighborhood and how to deal with it:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/dealing-with-low-quality-backlinks.html

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2010-09-06 13:22:32: Make Money at Home

Google - Finally, keep in mind that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time, and may disappear from our link graph relatively quickly. They may even already be being discounted by our algorithms.

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2010-01-24 12:23:29: Paul Watchorn

I have links from sites that I never knew existed, up to now I have never asked anybody for a link, I expect we will find out why these people link to sites at all, at the moment, I can't see what they get out of it. I also wonder why yahoo can manage to find 8542 links and Google can only find 3, are they bad at finding this data, or just too mean to share it?

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2010-01-28 11:29:43: Dan Richmond

@ Paul Watchorn

or just too mean to share it?

;) See my answer at http://www.seoinpractice.com/link-building-software.html

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2010-02-02 23:00:19: mike kikker

I think you're both right. Certainly early on linking from bad sites can hurt you. I think everyone's heard of the "sandbox effect". However, I think if you've already established an authority established reputable site you have a certain level of trust in the search engines eyes. IF you have reached a realy high status of trust, even the worst of bad links still counts for something (although it's probably a microscopic effect) as long as google still recognizes the site.
Once read a thread on a forum of someone trying to take down a #2 site (as they were #1 and had that site steal some ideas and write some nasty reviews about their site), so they sent an unfathonable amount of links using some blackhat tool in attempts to get them removed. It backfired and soon they were the one at #2. Regardless it was a hilarious read watching it play out, and raised some potential ideas about writing negative reviews about every #1 site for a related keyword, hoping they try the same tactic, lol.

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2010-02-02 23:04:31: mike kikker

The joke was that after that attempt, a new acronym was born
S.P.A.M.
Sites
Positioned
Above
Mine

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2010-02-04 04:18:31: vinod Yadav

Thanks for good suggestion about quality links.

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2010-03-21 22:53:32: Rituraj Sharma

HiDan,

May I know what is the criteria of a search engine to consider a website bed.
1. thousands of links = if it is then all link directories are bad sites.
2. Sites which sell sex/ sex medicines -
3. POorly optimised



There is one more point I want to talk about in link building --- sense of relevancy in inbound and outbound link. I think you will consider this point in upcoming chapters. But if not please let me know about the same.


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2010-03-24 12:01:06: Dan Richmond

I would choose 1 and 3 as affecting your rankings.

sense of relevancy in inbound and outbound link
Yes, we'll be talking about this.

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2010-03-24 23:56:47: Rituraj Sharma

Thanks for your kind support by answers.

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2010-04-19 05:29:10: Thomas Kampling

Hello there,
I have found a great tool fpr your linkquality check. Use
www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm to check the site you plan to link to first. Here you see if it has duplicate content, blogspam, bad links. The suggestions there are very accurate, and you would not want to link to a page with neg. results from this tool.

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2010-09-06 14:06:15: Make Money at Home

Hey, Thomas

I think this is very good (www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm)

Thank you man :)

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2010-05-12 10:15:01: kcaz armada

hello dan,

do you have a list of quality links that i can use in link building. Thank you.

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2011-02-03 15:50:50: Robert Anthony

This diy book is just what I was looking for. The quality of the content on this site is amazing and I'm heading over now to buy the tools mentioned. Thanks!

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2011-04-10 02:16:37: chanel Tan

Quality of page linking to you is so important.
10000 bad site linking to you cant beat even 1 reputable site ;)

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2011-05-27 13:10:51: Clark Heintz

My comment is coming in since Google has majorly cracked down on link farms a couple months ago. My question is, we have done everything on the up-and-up to optimize our website for search engines. We've been really careful about who we link with; I don't want to incur any penalties, so it's worth it to me, even it takes some time. After some Hubspot courses, I'm finding the only thing remaining is acquiring backlinks. And how do we get reputable websites to link to us? We do have several contacts in the industry with whom wer'e linked, however, we want to keep ramping it up. Any suggestions?

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2011-07-10 09:12:16: jobs by work

can any body tell me how to get quality backlinks

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2011-09-24 01:34:12: Michael Williams

If you've made the mistake of buying bad links, can you overcome them with quality ones?

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