Incoming links are generally a good thing, but what about when a spammer starts spamming other sites with your link?

Little background. I run USMC Hangout (http://www.usmchangout.com)

I was searching through Yahoo to find sites that are either linking to us or talking about us. First several pages are all from relevant sites. Ok great, and then I keep trucking on down the pages and start coming around what looks like other forum boards that were hacked (Some clearly now say HACKED BY:......) and the hacker/spammer will create a thread on that board and along with several other links will have a link to us but in the form of a new reply link (for our board) no skin off my back there as guests cannot post messages.

Here is a Yahoo search page about what I am talking about:
< removed due to the adult sites >

Now my question is...isn't this really bad? Obviously there is nothing I can do, we are talking about hundreds of sites.

Another question...what in the world and why in the world do they have that link for us?

I have had this, on a much smaller scale, happen to me as well. Does anyone have an answer?

Do you really cares for this ??
Can you affect optimization of seochat.com doing this ?

don't worry about it

I'm afraid this will affect your rankings or your site reputation, it can harm your site as well.

No It Doesn't!!!

Ok so it won't effect us, that I am pretty sure of. Our rankings are still good. And this has apparently been going on for a couple of years (after I looked at it closer). I just hate seeing those sites when I do a search.

I would assume the only way it would hurt us is if we linked back to them. But just them linking to us, we should not be penalized, correct?

Alot of those are from forums. You would think the owners would remove the posts. One I found was on a .edu site that had forums.

The forums will most likely have been abandoned by who ever started them up when they left college / school, nobody ever seems to clean them up and they just become a haven for porn spammers.

You will not be harmed by this as you do not have control over the sites that are linking to you. Think about.....What you can do to your competitors if you could place links to their sites on "bad neighbourhoods" And yeah, it might hurt you if you're linking to them.

Originally Posted by girlgeek

You will not be harmed by this as you do not have control over the sites that are linking to you. Think about.....What you can do to your competitors if you could place links to their sites on "bad neighbourhoods" And yeah, it might hurt you if you're linking to them.

Exactly. Google generally doesn't harm your rankings for any spamming that goes on on other sites as don't have control over who's linking to you. If you link out to "bad neighbourhoods", then you might notice your rankings changing etc. but they should remain unchanged for incoming links.

This will NOT harm your ranking, Google will just not add any weight to the bad links, and only to the good ones. Hope that makes sense.

Try to avoid side wide links also...

Side wide links are in history...

No inbound links are bad SEO. Some are more valuable than others, and not all are worth your time to build. But if other people are linking to you, it's outside your control and you're spending zero effort on getting those links, so these particular ones aren't good or bad.

Maybe a spammer thinks if they spam a few links to other sites the person they're spamming won't know who's doing it?

Incoming links have nothing to do with SEO, rather they're apart of SEM.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

No inbound links are bad SEO. Some are more valuable than others, and not all are worth your time to build. But if other people are linking to you, it's outside your control and you're spending zero effort on getting those links, so these particular ones aren't good or bad.

Maybe a spammer thinks if they spam a few links to other sites the person they're spamming won't know who's doing it?

I like that, thinking outside the box.

You have nothing to do with those links which you are not generate and it gives no bad effects on your search engines ranking results.

As long as you build quality links up they will far out weight the scrap sites that leech off your rss feed. I wouldn't worry about it.

Poor incoming links can't hurt your rankings. If this were the case, everyone's competitor would to it to them.