They can't really penalize you because then your competitors could go to bad neighbor sites and post links to your site in order to get you knocked out of the search engines.

I'd say they help a little if they aren't related. But related backlinks that are high PR will definitely help a lot more.

Off topic doesn't matter....just get the links. For example, if you belong to a bird forum but want to put a link for a muscle car site, it is still a link and it adds something. You likely won't get any traffic from the link but the Big G counts it as a link.

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Yes, they do.
Try to order some xrumer blast and you will see.

But isn't getting a blast of backlinks, say 20,000 in ten minutes, really suspicious?

That's the only reason google will de-credit your site. And if that really does mess up your ranking I guess it's the perfect tool to use for your competitors lol

Yeah seriously couldn't you X-rumer your rivals to get them sandboxed or something? Would be pretty easy way to take them down...probably easier than anything else.

I'd be interested to know how Google could know I got 20,000 backlinks in 10 minutes if they only crawl my site every two weeks ^_^

Regardless I'm not using X-rumer. I rather root around and find some good quality backlinks, I'm building them through forum posts and twitter myself while my members help out in other areas like youtube, blogs, facebook and other places I'm not as expert in or don't have time. It's organic though and will be slower.

Just as long as they're do-follow, they count.

xrumer? well, I had around 200k backlinks and guess what happened to my rankings?
nothing.

Thanks for the feedback on this, guys. Yeah my site's topic is unrelated to this site's though it's got a highly related keyword, which is interesting. I believe we are up to 5th place on google for our main keyword string after 2 and a half weeks. Progress, but unfortunately we're a site that people just don't seem to click unless we're the #1 result for our that keyword set.

the point is, if you are going to spend the time building links, get them from site related to your niche, the qount much much more. relevancy is important to the search engines.

This debate will rage on till the human species is long gone (or evolves into some sort of flying rabbit or something).

From my own personal experience, irrelevant backlinks (I don't even know what that really means BTW...some argue that the relevancy of the domain matters, some argue that only the relevancy of that particular page matters...so one could turn a profile page on a site about rabbits to become relevant about IM with the right text) help a lot in rankings. In fact, I never ever search out sites for relevancy. I am looking for links from authority sites, no matter the niche or topic that the site is about.

Also, don't worry about a "penalty". As already stated, Google won't penalize a site for incoming links (outgoing links is another matter), or you could just xrumer blast your opponents site.

Tom