Can linking out to a weak site harm my sites SEO?
-
We have an affiliate that wants us to link to his site to help him get started. His website looks okay and is in the same niche as us. However, he has PR 0 and no Page Trust.
We could work in a natural looking link in a news article, but there is no way he could be considered any kind of "authority" link. Can linking to his site harm us?
-
just nofollow it and then you can link to any site you want without worrying about anything. Link anywhere you want and it won't harm your site if it's nofollowed.
-
Great answers here already. All I'd like to add is: If the Search Engines did not exist / SEO did not exist ? Would you still link to them ? Are you going to be leading traffic to them ? Do you want to do that ?
I totally understand why the affiliate wants it. The question is, would you want to do it ?
-
I would have no problem making this link. I never look at a site's PR to decide whether or not I want to link to it.
Here are two things that might make me consider my decision:
1. If it was a site that I would not want to be visiting in front of my mom then I'd likely not link to it. (i.e. porn, gambling, buy viagra, etc.)
2. If this was becoming a pattern then I would be concerned. What I mean by that is that you need to be careful that your site doesn't become a glorified article network that exists just to link to other sites.
-
Linking to low quality sites is obviously harmful but a website with 0 PR is not considered to be low quality or weak website.
I think if the website is within your niche and you really think that this website is going to grow and attain lot of natural links in the near future… I think you surly should link to that website!
The only reason you should avoid linking to that website is because the current link profile is bad (i.e: links coming from porn or different spammed websites)
Hope this helps!
-
Linking to low quality sites can harm your site, especially if they are considered "bad neighborhood" sites such as porn, pills, and casinos.
That being said, if you think this site is of high quality and believe they will eventually grow in domain authority, by all means link to them. Every site has to start somewhere. Just be aware that Google judges the character of your site by the sites that you associate with, so choose who you link to wisely.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Spent months creating links but Webmasters not picking it up
Hey Guys, I've been working on Blast My Deals.com an affiliate site which i have an issue hoping you guys can help with. For the past year and a half we created loads of links from multiple domains at-least over 700+ which Webmasters did pick up since then we've created even more links however when we go in to our Search Console "Links to your site" it shows 214 domains. It seems like our old links are being removed and our new links aren't being added. All the links we created have an average of DA40+ For the past 2 weeks ive noticed a significant drop in organic traffic and loosing our positions on our main keywords. Our DA has also dropped from 33 to 29 in a matter of 2 weeks. I checked everything including robots.txt, sitemap.xml but Im unable to find the reason for it.
Affiliate Marketing | | kazirahman0 -
Person using expired domain and its links to drive traffic
Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)? The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com. It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links. It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like: http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/ Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer: http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/ It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks. However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage. Again, the site's totally different. And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too). My question is this: this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right? Is this prevalent on the internet? Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet? And how do I report him? I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords. (Disclosure: I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.) Any help would be sincerely appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | HandyWoman1 -
Why were all of my Amazon sites deindexed?
March 22nd.. The worst day of my Internet Marketing career. I got the dreaded message: Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.ricecookerreviewz.com/ We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Here's some interesting points: All of the content is unique and highly targeted to each product. Site is around 4-5 months old Every single one of my Amazon sites were hit.. How did they connect my sites together..? Why were they hit? List of some of my deindexed sites: http://www.inversiontablereviewshq.net/ http://www.breadmachinereviewshq.net/ http://www.ricecookerreviewz.com/ http://www.cooker-reviews.com/ http://www.ab-machine-reviews.net/ They are most definitely not, "thin affiliate sites". They have dozens of reviews, tons of articles, recipes, video.. Each site is like this.. I have started over, fresh content from my writers, fresh theme, fresh everything. But still, I would appreciate an answer as to what I'm doing wrong so that I can learn to not make the same mistake. Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | leetk3zzer0 -
In what ways would an affiliate site be okay with Google?
I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions. I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense. If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site. But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it? I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0 -
Limit of links in the same page
Hi, I have some pages that have more than 100 links. They are links to some stores (affiliate links). I set all of them as rel="nofollow" but I think Google is penalizing me because the link quantity. What is a good number of URL in the same page? Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | GDB0 -
Casino SEO
I'm considering entering the online casino arena with an affiliate site. These keywords such as 'online roulette', 'online blackjack' are massively competitive with high page and domain authority sites on page one. Does anyone have any experience of this area and is it possible to compete in it? Apparently long tail keywords don't really convert in this area so I may have to go for these highly competitive keywords. Any thoughts?
Affiliate Marketing | | SamCUK0 -
Best Way for Resellers to Use Outbound Links to Software Demos
I have a software reseller site that wants to have ever-present linking buttons to demos of the software they sell--the demos are on their software vendor sites. My concerns relate to SEO and leaking link juice; but, also to constantly providing visitors with the exit door. What are the best practices for such a situation?
Affiliate Marketing | | Court_LOQUA0 -
In search of the perfect SEO affiliate ID'd URL
Hi, I'm building an affiliate system for our website, and I obviously want to gain as much SEO benifit from it as possible. So I am wondering what the optimal solution is with regard to how an affilaite URL is tagged. After looking into it a bit more - I have come up with the following. 1/. Use an affilaite URL idendifier with a #
Affiliate Marketing | | James77
EG like www.mysite.com#123 2/. 301 redirect the affilaite URL to the "real URL"
EG www.mysite.com#123 301 -> www.mysite.com What do you think of this? Thanks0