Belated Whiteboard Friday - Can Bad Links Hurt Me?

SEO digest

As some of you may have noticed, we've been a bit delinquent in our video posts. What with the Thanksgiving holiday, Rand's travel schedule, and my ill-fated (yet brief) bout with the plague, the production schedule in Whiteboard Studios fell a little off-track.  The good news is we feel really bad about it, so here's an extra make-up dose of rock 'em, sock 'em Whiteboard Friday Tuesday action for ya'!
This week Rand looks at a frequent concern we hear about: Will links from bad sites hurt my rankings?


The answer is generally 'no' but there are some qualifications. Everyone has some bad links pointing to them through no fault of  their own. What can make a difference is the percentage of your total links that are "bad" and how they point to you.

Ask yourself this: Does your inbound link profile look like it was manipulated, overly-optimized, and illicitly acquired?  If it looks that way to you, it'll look that way to the engines.

Watch the video for more details on this important topic.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Can Bad Links Hurt Me? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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published @ December 10, 2008