The ins and outs of links that can hurt

What is know about hurting links

Out-links

It has been know for some time that linking out to spammy sites can hurt. Links are endorsements and if you endorse spammy sites than your site is seen as not trustworthy. If you link to and therefore endorse trustworthy sites with useful content then your site gains trust also. One should not try to hoard link juice by not linking at all, Duane Forrester from Bing states that linking shows them you care about your users gaining useful information.

In-links

In-links can also hurt you, but its not so easy to lose trust as it can be with out-linking. It is much more likely that bad in-links will be discounted rather then penalize you. If you buy links in any large way, you may have a worry, if you participate in link farming or like farming then you would want to worry. For those of us that have a few bad in-links, even if you did at one stage participate in buying some links, as long as these links do not make up a large proportion of your links then you need not worry.

Links in general

Links in general pass link juice from the linking page to the linked page. So what is link juice? Well link juice is s common name for everything good about links.

This includes page rank, page relevancy, link text relevancy, trust and authority.
The original algorithm released by Google before the term Search Engine Optimization existed told us how page rank was calculated. There has been numerous changes to this part of the algorithm since that time, but tests show that the general idea still holds true. In the original a page passed %85 of its PR though its out-links, and keeps %15. If a page has a PR of 100 and has 4 links then each link would receive 25PR.

There are many more rules that alter this; here are a few we know of.

• The first link will pass more then the others.
• Links also carry different weight depending on where they are in a page.
• Links in the main content area carry more weight than other areas in the page, the footer carries the least.
• If there is two links to the same page only the first will carry link text relevancy, it may be that only the first of these links carries PR also, I am not sure on that point.
• A page can rank for keywords in the link text alone, even if the keywords do not appear on the linked page.

What I look for in a link, is

1. Page relevancy
   • A link that comes from a relevant page is always the prime target in link-building.
2. Next is relevant link text
   • This is very important and may yet be more important that page relevancy.
3. Position in page
   • Always look for a link in the main content area first.
4. Page rank
   • Most inexperienced in SEO state this is the most importance, yet those that have long experience in SEO see it as less important.

Further reading

Hope this helps you somewhat. For those that would like to learn more about page rank and linking, should read this page, A simple explanation of PageRank.