High Quality Vs Low Quality Backlinks

[Kevin Walker]

Hi Warriors!

Question 1: can anyone tell me if it's worth having any/many low quality back links pointing to my website or is it best to stick to just high quality backlinks?

Question 2: would low quality backlinks give me any traffic or are they a complete waste of time especially if they are nofollow links?

Many thanks in anticipation.

Kevin Walker.

[King Shiloh]

If they are no follow links, I think it's a waste of time. As for low quality and high quality backlinks, any backlink has the potential to generate traffic.

[oneplusone]

Question 1: can anyone tell me if it's worth having any/many low quality back links pointing to my website or is it best to stick to just high quality backlinks?

A: You DO want low quality backlinks too, you want things to seem as NATURAL as possible to Google.

Getting ONLY high quality backlinks to a site is NOT natural.

Question 2: would low quality backlinks give me any traffic or are they a complete waste of time especially if they are nofollow links?

A: The same as above, you want everything to appear natural to Google.

So you want low quality backlinks, nofollow links also.

A mixture of everything is what happens naturally, you don't want to do anything that appears unnatural.

[JohnMcCabe]

Kevin, take a look at the linking patterns of high-ranking established sites in competitive markets. They'll generally have a lot of links of all kinds. Some will be 'high quality' as defined by the current SEO dogma, some will not. Some will be 'no-follow', some will not. Some will be linked using keyword anchor text, some using the site url or name, and some will be linked via 'click here'.

That's a natural link pattern.

Now suppose you have a site that only has backlinks from PR8 .edu forum profiles, all using one keyword phrase as the anchor text. That would be the other extreme.

If a search engine has publicly declared that they look for patterns that identify attempts to game their system and de-index those, which linking pattern above would raise red flags?

[Kevin Walker]

Originally Posted by Kevin Walker

Hi Warriors!

Question 1: can anyone tell me if it's worth having any/many low quality back links pointing to my website or is it best to stick to just high quality backlinks?

Question 2: would low quality backlinks give me any traffic or are they a complete waste of time especially if they are nofollow links?

Many thanks in anticipation.

Kevin Walker.

Hi King, thanks for this.

Is it also true to say that high quality backlinks are good for getting your webpage/site high page ranking in Google and other search engines and that low quality backlinks will only get you noticed by the search engines but not ranked by them?

If this is the case how many low quality backlinks should I have and how many high quality backlinks should I have? Is there an ideal ratio of the two?

Many thanks, Kevin.

[RyanEagle]

Nofollow, dofollow, whatever - if you get masses of low quality backlinks into your site you CAN gain rankings.

[peekay]

There are some valid points raised here.

Also take 1 second to check out this article: xomba.com/are_you_making_these_5_deadly_link_building_mistak es

might save you some heartache down the line.

[SpeakToTman]

As mentioned by "oneplusone" above, you need a good mixture of links to make things seem natural. As for SEO and ranking, high quality RELATED links definitely help you rank higher and faster...but having large amounts of low quality links do also help.

NOTE: If you have a new site, do not build too many low quality links - especially with blog commenting software or the like...you stand a very serious chance of getting your site either sandboxed or de-indexed all together!
If you have the ability to build large amounts of low quality links...build a free blog or set up a site that links to your main site..then blast the blog with low quality links

Low quality links --> Free Blog --> Main site

This way you still get link juice passed on to your main site, but without the risk of it getting sandboxed..

[13131jonny]

Originally Posted by oneplusone

Question 1: can anyone tell me if it's worth having any/many low quality back links pointing to my website or is it best to stick to just high quality backlinks?

A: You DO want low quality backlinks too, you want things to seem as NATURAL as possible to Google.

Getting ONLY high quality backlinks to a site is NOT natural.

Question 2: would low quality backlinks give me any traffic or are they a complete waste of time especially if they are nofollow links?

A: The same as above, you want everything to appear natural to Google.

So you want low quality backlinks, nofollow links also.

A mixture of everything is what happens naturally, you don't want to do anything that appears unnatural.

I completely agree. You need a mixture of links to make everything look natural.