Any sites can harm my website if linking to it?

Can anysites be bad for my website reputation in SE if they link to it?

Well, I can only tell you that the answer to your question is "yes"! There are sites that can be bad for your reputation.
Though, I cannot tell you exactly what kind of sites since I don't know But I guess that there are sites banned by the search engines, phishing sites or sites that are connected to illicit activities like a hacking site or a child porn site

no, i mean like submition engines

If the site is linking to your site, and you are not linking to it, then generally no.

You can't control what sites link to you if someone wants to. Search engines recognize that and are not going to penalize you for a link, say, coming from a porn site. If search engines penalized sites for incoming links, then webmasters could easily haze each other by posting links to a competitor's site on bad rep sites.

Good point you got there, But i am asking about directories, im using recipricals and i read something that it might be bad?

I don't know anything about that but there are some things that I know. Sometimes, there are certain sites, link farms if I recall correctly, that are some sort of directories but a link from them doesn't worth a thing because they are ignored by crawlers.

as of yet having your site listed with directories doesn't harm you any...though yes google does value directory links a bit less

unless you are buying a ton of high pr links then no

as Cedik said yes, stay away from link farms, general spammy directories or spammy link pages on sites that aren't even really connected to the site

always make sure that where you are submitting your site to doesn't use the nofollow tags as this won't gain you anything but human views...

if pr is what you are after, stay away from gambling sites and adult sites both linked to your site and on your site....

About the only thing you have to concern yourself with when using reciprocals, well...actually a few things:

Does the directory have a bad rep with Google, or is it even banned? This is easy enough to confirm with a pagerank check.

Your strongest links are going to be relevant links. Unless you are another directory, it is difficult to justify a link in a directory as relevant. Exceptions would be where it were a specialized directory, say a business directory, pertinent to your site.

Don't overdo it with reciprocals, especially if you have lots of other links on your page. Google does not like pages that have lots of links (we are speaking of 100 or more, not 10 or 20). There are plenty of directories out there that will list you without a reciprocal link. Despite the suggestion that they will likely list your site sooner if you include a reciprocal, unless they are a high ranking directory, they will likely consider any link posted to them with the same timeliness.


This may sound strange, and certainly controversial, but my advice is to stop reading about it and simply do it. Webmasters are as full of BS as anybody you will meet (take Webnuts for example) and will happily give you their opinion on somehting, and that opinion is more often based on something they read rather than from experience.

Unless Google just really has it in for you (and highly unlikely there), your site is a subdomain of a banned domain, or you submit to nothing but porn and gambling affiliated directories (and if it's a porn site, what's wrong with that anyway), you would have to go a long way to have a backlink that is going to hurt you. You just want to be careful to what sites you link; that is more likely to hurt you.

If you are looking for PR, then yes..

Links on banned sites or sites specified by the previous posts can harm your PR. No one completely figure out PR technology of Google, but many got the experience of getting to lower place on PR by large scale link posting, or spam postings....

I don't think that external links to your site not influence other factors since they are not under your control.

Also don't try to put links of other illegal sites (That violates the TOS of search engines) on your site. That can affect your site lot.. Be careful on that, mainly on forums. You must imply some strict rules to avoid this activities.

Let me expand a little on what Iven said, so you don't misunderstand it.

If you are looking to increase your pagerank, bad links and links on sites with no ranking, or banned sites, will contribute nothing to your pagerank. However, they could have a negative affect on your pagerank if you have an oversaturation of bad links; it is like diluting the good links with the bad.

It's basically like saying that 10 good links on recognized sites is worth more than 1000 links on unknown, or poorly rated, sites.

If you are looking to build your pagerank with a good reputation, be a little more selective with where you post your link, but a bad link here and there is not going to hurt you.

If you are primarily looking for traffic and to be indexed by other search engines, post a link to your site wherever you can. Unless you are spam posting hundreds of links a day, it's not going to hurt you, but it's not going to mean anything when it comes to getting ranked either.

Even nofollow links are indexed by some search engines. For example, Alexa index nofollow links. So giving comments on blogs will help you some times (but not in case of Google search engine).

well, i am posting in related forums, but i was asking cuz i registered in link bank, and in a website claiming that it submits the website to alot of search engines, every now and them irecieve an email saying confirm your url

Repeated submissions to search engines with automated bots simply ban your site from those search engines where your site is submitting. So be careful before joining on such programs. Also Google not supports spamming or activities similar to that..

It is perfectly normal to receive confirmation emails from search engines when you have submitted your site to them. Just, as Iven pointed out, don't overuse the free multiple submissions as you do not want to submit your site to the same search engine more than once a month or they will take it as spamming and either not list you or delist you.