SEO CheckList

We already know links FROM spammy sites are a no-no but how about link TO spammy sites? I don’t actually consider this a major factor in the rankings game. Say, for example, you sold a link to a porn site in your web site and the buyer had paid 3 years worth of link space and then, after a while, you learned about this. That one link, at least in my opinion, won’t hurt your rankings. It’s when you continuously link to or currently have a humongous collection of links to spam web sites and web sites banned by Google, for example, that would really hurt your rankings in the SERPs.

Why?

Well, think of it in terms of backlinking. When you link to a web site, that would mean there’s something there you’d like your visitors to see. Search engines would then look at it as a vote of confidence from you to that web site. It doesn’t matter if you’re saying that web site is good or bad, all that matters is that you’re linking to it. So if, for example, you have 200 links to bad communities, there’s no question that the search engines would take notice. If your domain is a forum, links to spammy sites can’t be helped since the content is user-generated.

What To Do

If your web site has user-generated content, then you pretty much can’t do anything about eradicating links to bad sites from your domain. The most you can do is improve the ratio of bad links to good links. Meaning make sure your web site has a larger ratio of links to good and trusted web sites. If you have user-generated content, however, there will also be many who’ll post quality outbound links.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is, links to spammy sites aren’t exactly that detrimental, in my book, unless they go in numbers. If you take time to balance with good outbound links, you have nothing to worry about.