Google's take on low quality back links

Can low quality back links to your site harm your rankings? Well, google has just released a post on that very topic. There is a misconception that by having links to your site on link farms, malware infested and spammy websites can harm your rankings. If this were the case then it would be relatively easy to scupper your competition by adding thier links on numerous low quality sites. This would not be a good situaiton if it were the case, however google's official line is that there is " Almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your rankings " Therefore, putting your competitors links on spammy sites is at best wasting your time and at worst, one of the links could be misidentified as ok, and would help them.

But what about other factors relating to your site, ie reputation and relevency. I will consider both separately below:

Reputation

If your site consistently appears amonst links to bad sites (bad neighbourhood as the big G calls it) then this may have a negative affect on your branding an reputation, even greater is the damage if the link text contains misleading or derogatory content. For example, if you sold designer menswear and put a link saying Fake Designer Menswear -then this could make anyone visiting your site believe that you are selling fake or counterfeit goods. This can lead to viral distrust and if the information is posted on other blogs, then it can have a very bad impact. Also, there is the chance that the relevent authorities might want to investigate the claim.

Relevancy

If your link is grouped with other links in an irrelevent or misleading category, this might lead google to index your page for this category. If for example, my site was in a page describing bad SEO companies, then there is the chance that my site may show up in a search for 'bad SEO companies". One example of this happening is if you put in " pretend advertising agency website " into google, then www.blueinkagency.com comes near the top of page 1. (note, this link has a nofollow attribute so does not contribute to the google rankings for this search phrase)

Google Says...

What google advises is that if you see these links poping up in your webmaster tools, you should firstly try to contact the webmaster of the site involved to ask them to remove the link. Also, you should remember than backlinks are just one of the many factors affecting your ranking, and " having something that people want to look at and use... is a HUGE factor " - so you should concern yourself more with selling your own website by having great content and dont worry too much about the backlinks. Such low quality backlinks rarely last long, and if the site is malware infested or spammy, then you can report these sites to google using either their spam report or their paid links report .