[Frau_gt]

I've heard different opinions on this subject. I swap links with any website as long as I feel my type of customer visits those sites and if it will bring me business. Am I wrong for thinking this way? Will google penalize me in the rankings for some of these non related sites?

[T2DMan]

Originally Posted by Frau_gt

I've heard different opinions on this subject. I swap links with any website as long as I feel my type of customer visits those sites and if it will bring me business. Am I wrong for thinking this way? Will google penalize me in the rankings for some of these non related sites?

Please note your signature! You are getting links from a non related website - namely Time2Dine.

In general, in my experience, I have seen that a link is a link is a link. While themed links probably do get higher rankings faster for particular url's, it is possible to get high solely because you have MANY links, irrespective from where they come from.

[tanjh]

They won't. You will just get less weight for them.

[Gracia]

think if you organize the links in some sort of structure (like say, a directory) you're fine linking to unrelated websites.

The issue would be more one of quality - if you are linking to too many websites in bad neighbourhoods (whatever that is) you may be running a bit of a risk.

I think there may also be an issue of too high a percentage of your links being reciprocal if that's all you do in terms of link building, but I have seen websites rank well solely on reciprocals.

[monica78]

I made a mistake before on linking to link farm sites. And it did not do good.

Any ideas why those link farms are harmful to your site? Did google determine that?

[Janet Juliet]

They dont really. But you dont get the result as you link your pages to the relative pages.

[MH Vishal]

I think it would depend on several factors:

1) How much trust Google has in your domain. If you have a lot of quality backlinks and very good rankings, Google likely trusts your website and may turn a blind eye to minor problems.
2) How many unrelated websites you link to. If you just link to handful of unrelated websites it should be fine. If you link to dozens or hundreds it may be a bigger problems.
3) How unrelated those websites are. Google probably won't penalize you for linking to indirectly related website. If the website is completely unrelated Google may not like it.
I don't think you will get penalized just for linking to a few unrelated websites.Google might care that you have exchanged links with these unrelated websites though. That may then be classified as a linking scheme meant to affect rankings.

[penkenny]

Nope google wont.

[bullzeye]

Its just a myth. I have seen this topic since the day I started doing seo. If google penalizes websites which gets links from non related website, every competitor will be building links for the competing website instead of building for his own.

[T2DMan]

I have seen many websites that have people copying their content, especially the words around their search phrases. Such websites have gone down in their Google positions for those search phrases. Yes, I have seen it on my very own searchmasters.co.nz website where over 1000 sites copied my meta description, and as a result my homepage stopped ranking for its main search phrase - the inner page ranked instead.

Once I had made the content unique, the homepage started ranking again.

I have also seen websites rank lower when they have got links from certain places... or got too many too fast... you have to be so careful.