Whats the difference between a relevant and a crap backlink? Options

[NovaArgon]

How do you sort out your relevant links and your crap links? For example my Gamer Union site doesn't even have content on it and I've got almost 800 pages linking to it from my forums sig. Is it good to have a lot of backlinks even if most of them are crap and not related to your site at all or does it harm your site? I don't want to load my site up with content about the gaming culture and then the SE's get pissed because all my backlinks come from web design forums and put me on page 25 for searches.

I also noticed while looking at the list of sites that there are a lot of gaming sites that are not linking to me but using the phrase Gamer Union or Gamer's Union in a conversation or post that has nothing to do with my site. Am I getting freebies for having a cool domain name? If they are showing up when I use googles link function that means they are being counted as relevant links coming from another gaming site right?

Thanks for any advice.

[Christian J]

How do you sort out your relevant links and your crap links? For example my Gamer Union site doesn't even have content on it and I've got almost 800 pages linking to it from my forums sig.

On this forum links contain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow which should make them less useful in at least Google. Still lots of spammers create nonsense posts with various signature spam links, maybe because they haven't noticed the rel="nofollow" attribute value or maybe because they target search engines that don't support it.

Is it good to have a lot of backlinks even if most of them are crap and not related to your site at all

Probably not.

or does it harm your site?

Google says something like that here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/b...py?answer=66356 but OTOH http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/b...p;ctx=sibling#4 says "There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking" (note the word "almost" though). So my guess is the signature links will be a waste of time, but not really hurt your site.

Am I getting freebies for having a cool domain name?

Keywords in a domain name might be useful, though it would be even better if the name described the site's content. What use is a visitor if he goes away as soon as he notices your site is not what he thought?

If they are showing up when I use googles link function that means they are being counted as relevant links coming from another gaming site right?

Didn't quite understand that, didn't you write about the phrase "Gamer Union" on sites not linking to you?

See also http://htmlhelp.com/faq/html/publish.html#index-better

[NovaArgon]

Thanks for the replay.

As for the cool domain name when I search for sites that are linking to me I get some sites that just use the words gamer union not the link and its showing as a link to my site.

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/unions/read_...p;union_id=5581

for example gamespot doesn't have a link to my url but they use the phrase gamer union on this post and its showing up as a site that links to mine even though my url is no where on the page.

So since my domain name is cool i'm getting free backlinks from these guys every time the use my sites name?

This post has been edited by NovaArgon: Aug 28 2009, 02:13 PM

[Christian J]

As for the cool domain name when I search for sites that are linking to me I get some sites that just use the words gamer union not the link and its showing as a link to my site.

Where is it showing as a link to your site? I found no sites linking to you: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=l....gamerunion.com

[NovaArgon]

http://www.google.com/search?q=linkdomain%...lient=firefox-a

Any of the ones from gamespot.

I'm not searching the same way you are though. I think doing it that way is broken or out dated. At least that's what this website is saying.

http://www.adrenalyn.com.au/google-link-command.htm

the command i'm using is

linkdomain:www.gamerunion.com

[Christian J]

I'm not searching the same way you are though.

That might explain it. Google doesn't support "linkdomain:", only Yahoo does. So if you try that in Google it returns pages contains the words "gamerunion" just like a normal web search, even if they're not part of a link.

I think doing it that way is broken or out dated. At least that's what this website is saying.

http://www.adrenalyn.com.au/google-link-command.htm

It's true that "link:" has always been a bit buggy in Google, but it still works: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahtmlhelp.com

In fact I had trouble finding information about it on the Google help pages (is it removed?), but here it is: http://code.google.com/apis/soapsearch/reference.html#2_2

[NovaArgon]

Its just strange to me that I've got links all over the place and none of them are showing up with the link command.

I can view the source code of this forum and see that my Sig link has a no follow on it but this is the only forum I'm on that does that.

I'm not to upset about it since none of them were good links to have anyways but thanks for all the links i'm going to read through them and see if I understand how it all works better.

Thanks