Question: A site links to mine that’s in another category. If my site is about sports and the linking site is a flower shop, will this hurt my authority in a niche because it comes from a site in an unrelated topic?
Answer: No, it won’t. Inbound links from an unrelated domain won’t hurt you. This hasn’t stopped SEO’s from spreading the opposite idea, but this is one of those bits of confusion in SEO that eventually becomes conventional wisdom. While an unrelated link won’t give a lot of optimization value to your site, it won’t cause any undue harm either. It could bring in traffic though, so on balance it’s not something to worry about.
There are plenty of higher quality links you could have coming from a site, and you should definitely diversify incoming links (such as from forums, blogs, static websites, etc.), but that’s not what this is about: it’s about unrelated inbound links and how that shouldn’t pose much of a problem.
Sabotage by the Competition
Google doesn’t want to start a bunch of web wars between webmasters. Imagine what would happen if unrelated links actually did affect SERPs. A competitor could swoop in and make a fleet of sites in unrelated categories all linking to the competition in a bid to damage the competition’s authority in the niche.
This is just not how it works. You want as many backlinks as you can get. It’s not as if you can control who links to you. Suppose someone running a blog about sports links to this blog. Maybe he just likes the SEO information. I’m not about to ask him to take down his link just because it’s in an unrelated niche. It doesn’t hurt my authority – especially if I have a number of other links coming in from SEO-related sites, which can actually be pretty tangential, covering a lot of different computer-related niches. Sites can be about web design, affiliate marketing, blogging - basically anything related to the Internet. My authority will not be compromised just because an off-topic site, or even several, decides to link to me.
Now, where it does become a problem is for the guy running the sports site. If he’s only linking to unrelated pages, then it’s hard for spiders to tell exactly the aim of his site, which will damage his site’s authority. The moral there: outbound links are far more important to site authority than inbound links. For the most part, you should welcome one way links whenever possible. A few unrelated or link farm-esque links aren’t going to bring down your entire linking strategy.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Thanks for clearing that up. I suppose the concern here is for those of us who have Dofollow comments - this attracts people from all over looking for backlinks, often in unrelated niches. Would you say this is something to be concerned about?
December 5th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Well, given that comments have less ranking power than post links, it’s not as big of an issue. But yeah, anyone with a blog should moderate comments and use the backlink checker I wrote about earlier to make sure that the site is square. And if most of your comments are about the web (your niche) you’ll be fine. Thanks for the comment(s).
December 5th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I found you through someones commentluv; good stuff (although we need a subscribe to comments plugin and email enabled subscription option
).
This is indeed where a lot of confusion stems. You can’t really control who links to you, but you can certainly control your own backlinks…this is where most screw up thinking all backlinks are good.
As for comments, I always hover anyway since I like to visit those that comment on my blogs. I don’t allow affiliate links or anything that looks fishy. Most of the really well know get caught by Akismet anyway.
December 5th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Hey, thanks for the tip about subscribe to comments. Installed, working. Still fixing house around here. Taking a new template out for a run…
December 6th, 2008 at 8:29 am
I understand and thanks! Could you also enable an email option for subscription? I’d like to subscribe, but I only do so through email…I hate feed readers. LOL
December 6th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Your wish is my search for a plugin. Still looking for a way to make a nicer looking input form than the one put out by Subscribe2 or Feedburner, but there it is in the bottom right.
December 6th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Thanks!
December 17th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Thanks for an interesting post. I may not have understood your answer to Rodney. If you received a comment from someone who puts his link to his website, which is an entirely different niche do you accept this comment.
Peter Lee
December 17th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Peter, thanks for writing. Unless you’re getting bombarded with comments all from a different niche then linking in a comment isn’t going to hurt you, especially if the commenter has left a useful comment that improves content for the post. As comment links don’t have that much PR power, a few links within many more in your niche isn’t going to damage your site’s authority. Judging by your blog’s comments, the vast majority are ebusiness/marketing related so you’re fine.