Can Links Hurt Rankings?

A question that I frequently see across the web concerning many new webmasters is whether or not links can hurt your sites’ rankings. There are two popular variations to this question as well, which include can links from “unfriendly” sites hurt your sites’ rankings, and can too many links hurt your sites’ rankings? I’ll get to both of these questions within this post one at a time.

Regarding the first question of “unfriendly” sites linking to your site hurting your sites’ rankings, the simple answer is no. No link can necessarily hurt you, when it comes into relation to this question, because if a link like this could hurt you, many competitors would be knocking out their competition on the web by linking to competing sites on “unfriendly” sites. By the way, “unfriendly” sites are adult sites, spam sites, Google-blacklisted sites, and other kinds of sites that are either frowned upon by search engines, break search engines’ terms of service, and/or contain illegal and/or inappropriate content. Please note that although links from “unfriendly” sites will not hurt your sites’ rankins, they will also not benefit your site or its rankings as well – these links will have no affect on your site’s keyword ranking placement within search engine search results. Links from “unfriendly” sites may get you traffic, but will most-likely be untargeted traffic, so if you’re planning on buying links be sure to buy links from relevant websites – this’ll allow you to receive benefits in terms of search engine ranking placements as well as possibly bring your site targeted traffic.

Now onto the next question of can too many links hurt your site? The short answer to this one, again, is no, because the basic concept of linking is that the more people that link to your site, the better your site, content, or product/service must be. Links are like the Internet’s method of promotion, particularly “word-of-mouth” advertising. Now, on the other hand, too many links too fast can get you banned from some leading search engines such as Google, because algorithms are set up to prevent sites that spam links from cheating their way to the top. Think smart, because these search engines know what it is. Don’t spam your link everywhere or buy a thousand or so links in one day, because it will raise a flag and most-likely get your banned out of a search engine’s index completely. I think the max number of links you can achieve in one day is somewhere between fifty and one hundred, so definitely try to keep the number of links you attain in one day somewhere in between that range, just to stay safe.

It’s important to continuously attain links to your site, to improve rankings. Be smart about the number of links you attain, and where you attain them from. Think like an innovator to find out a method that will attain you a solid number of links as well. And remember, links are an online method for people to spread the word – it’s basically the same as “word-of-mouth” advertising. That’s why many search engines look at the number of links to a site to determine the site’s placement for specific keywords, because in a theory, these links are the foundation for your site’s reputation and credibility, for whatever it may provide.