Can lots of bad links pointing to my site harm my rankings?
Posted by John Mueller on May 6th, 2007
The Google Webmaster Tools console can display the known links pointing to your site. In many cases, there will be countless links from “bad” sites like “scrapers” or web-spammers. Can these harm my ranking? Since I have noticed them in my webmaster tools console, my rankings have dropped. What can I do to have those links removed?
Fear of links pulling down a site’s value
In general, Google ignores links to your site when they are from sites that have no value. Google will in many cases still find those links and display them in the links listing. Google’s “pagerank” algorithm bases the value that is passed through a link on the page that is linking (and some other items). The value passed can only be positive, it is not possible to pass negative pagerank. In that sense, a link can only pass value (if only minimally) or not pass value at all. Looking at it this way tells us that countless bad links can only be positive for your site.
Google’s algorithm progresses over time and gets better and better at recognizing junk pages and links. It is possible that Google had previously passed some positive value through those bad links. If Google now discounts those links completely, it is possible that your site’s total value might decline. The more bad links that point to your site that used to pass value, which have now been discounted, the more it is possible that your site’s total value declines and that your ranking is influenced. This is however not due to those bad links, but rather due to a lack of good links. Any site that has a significant part of it’s total value based on links from bad sites will be influenced sooner or later.
Fear of being associated with bad sites
Google does not associate your site with those who are linking to it. Google associates it with the sites that you are linking to. It does not matter if you have 10′000 links from bad sites, as long as you do not link back to those bad sites, Google will know that you do not want to be associated with them. It is for this reason that having an open “link-exchange” on your site can be problematic: you will be automatically linking back to them, associating your site with theirs.
Fear of being linked with a bad anchor-text
The anchor-text is the text that is being used to link. For example, the link to Google contains the anchor-text “Google” (but the link goes to Yahoo :)): <a href=”http://www.yahoo.com”>Google</a>.
Google (and many other search engines) associate the anchor-text of a link with the site. This used to go so far that with many, many links you could make a site rank very high for a text that is not found on the site itself (”Google Bowling”, eg a search for [click here] shows a page that does not contain that term). What happens if many bad sites link to your site with a bad anchor-text? Google will pass general value to your site (as available, from the page linking) and additionally value the specific anchor-text that was given. However, this will only be an issue when someone is actually searching for that term. Assuming they link to your site with “company xyz sucks” - this will only cause your site to rank higher for that specific search term, it will not negatively influence your other rankings.
Removing bad links to your site
In general, it is not possible to forbid someone to link to you. The only thing you can do to have those links removed is to try to contact the webmaster of those sites and to ask to have them removed. In general, it will be very difficult to contact the webmaster of junk-sites and often times they will have no interest in changing anything like that in their sites (especially if those sites are generated automatically). It is often futile to try to have those links removed - and if Google does not penalize the site for having those links, it is not even necessary to try to have them removed.
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