Is it even worth getting a link from PR0-2 , unrelated themed sites?

[gundogs]

Is it even worth getting a link from PR0-2 , unrelated themed sites like http://www.area-rug-news.com/ or http://www.denvercohomerentals.com/ to my PR4 health training site that has been around since 2007? Can getting a sitewide blogroll link do more harm than good?

[MatthewEgan]

More importantly, you want a healthy ratio of Followed and No Followed links.  If all of your links are followed, it will look like it was done on purpose.

Look at your competition and see how many of their links are followed, vs. not followed, and try to keep a somewhat similar ratio.

No Follow links are a natural part of the Internet, so if you focus your SEO on ONLY building Followed Links, you're going to be doing great Link Building, but overall horrible SEO, because your profile will look manipulated.

No Follow Happens.  Embrace it.

[MatthewEgan]

More importantly, you want a healthy ratio of Followed and No Followed links.  If all of your links are followed, it will look like it was done on purpose.

Look at your competition and see how many of their links are followed, vs. not followed, and try to keep a somewhat similar ratio.

No Follow links are a natural part of the Internet, so if you focus your SEO on ONLY building Followed Links, you're going to be doing great Link Building, but overall horrible SEO, because your profile will look manipulated.

No Follow Happens.  Embrace it.

[gundogs]

Of course! I'm actually hoping you are correct and by cleaning out the trash I'll move up 1-2 spots on some of the keywords.I just don't see how see how those remaining links are going to support my current rankings.

Are you happy with the rankings you have using your current techniques? Do you have any to share?

[KeriMorgret]

That should be an interesting test. I hope you can share the results with us here or on YouMoz, if you're comfortable with that.

[gundogs]

No offense, but I'm actually starting to second guess these answers a bit. Using the answers provided I looked at one of my domains and the links coming in. 90% of it's links are from 20 sites linked together, under the same GA, on the same C block. They are trash domains with very little value and my links are site wide blogroll links. The rest of my links are just a dmoz, squidoo, ezine and hubpages.

Yet my site has been ranked #1/#3/#4 for 3 semi-competitive keywords (2 million competing) for more than 5 years and does well.

I'm going to run a test and remove the trash links to see what happens. My gut instinct is that google values more volume of links/domains than neighborhoods but we'll see.

[gundogs]

Wow, it's almost worth setting up different identities for each domain if you're even linking relevant sites for legitimate reasons?

[KeriMorgret]

A comment about the spyonweb site. It's to be taken as a signal, but not gospel truth. At one point, there was some common factor relating all of those sites together, but it may not be the case now. On one of my old sites, I also see other sites with the same beginning string in GA. I haven't worked on those sites in five years and don't have access to them or the GA code anymore, though at one point I did.

[KeriMorgret]

No. I wouldn't trust the toolbar page rank, or figure Google would catch up with them soon enough and devalue those links. The rug site especially shows no signs that it was made by humans or for humans. That site has over 20,000 non-unique articles that are generated by a keyword search. This post from today http://www.area-rug-news.com/2011/09/25/what-is-the-best-way-in-carpet-cleaning/ turns up a couple of thousand similar results in google.

The home rental site shares a Google Analytics account code with a porn site, and with several of the sites its linking too. Google can tell all of that real easy (see http://spyonweb.com/denvercohomerentals.com).

I would not go for the link.

[Micke]

That way you get link, but not getting any penalty. People who visit that site can click and visit you.

[gundogs]

Would you feel different if one were a PR/MR of 6 - even if it had the same content?

[KeriMorgret]

For those two sites? I would pass. Take a look at this page on the Denver Home Rentals site. It's for House, Season Four. http://www.denvercohomerentals.com/denver-rental-property/house-m-d-season-four. If you were Google, would you trust a site like this? Would you think it should pass good karma and link juice to you? It looks like a lot of stuff generated based off of keywords trying to get affiliate sales, and hardly seems relevant to even itself, much less a health training site.

Both of those sites have the same off-topic sitewide links. I wouldn't want my site grouped with that type of neighborhood, personally.

Not all sitewide links are bad, but I'd not opt to have my site on any sites in that network.

[gundogs]

Why would I want a nofollowed link?

[Micke]

I would suggest that you focus your link building on related sites.You can otherwise request to get the link, but with a nofollow to your site.