Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value

[esendex]

Do bad links "hurt" your ranking or just not add any value. By this I mean, if you do have links from link farms and bad neighbourhoods, would it effectively pull you down in search engine rankings. Or is it more that it's just a waste of time to get these links, as it adds no value to your ranking.

Are google saying avoid them because it will not have a positive effect, or avoid them becuase it will have a negative effect.

I am under the opinion that it will not harm, but it will not help either. I think this because at the end of the day you are not 100% in control of your inbound links, any bad site could add you and if a competitor, god forbid, wanted to play some black hat games, couldn't they just add you to thousands of bad sites to pull your ranking down?

Interested to hear your opinions on the matter, or any "facts" if they are out there.

[RyanKent]

There is a ton of information available concerning this topic. I would recommend using the Search function to find information.

In short, bad links can harm a site. The question is how many of a site's inbound links are harmful. If you have a site with 100 links and 90 of them are bad, then you have a problem. If you have a site with 10k links and 1k are bad, you are fine. You want a good overall link profile.

[AlanMosley]

Here is a article from bing on the subject

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/31/link-farms-and-like-farms-don-t-be-tempted.aspx

[irvingw]

yea but the big difference is bing does not penalize sites for bad links google does and getting knocked out of google is majorly crippling to a website due to their search engine dominance.

bad links can definitely take a site down in google. always keep an eye on your incoming links to make sure competition isn't doing any harmfiul linking to your site, and always concentrate on getting good clean links yourself to strengthen your site making it harder for bad links to affect you.

[AlanMosley]

You must of missed it, bing also can hurt you for bad links. look for the word hurt
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/31/link-farms-and-like-farms-don-t-be-tempted.aspx

[USHoleInOne]

I have a friend in the SEO community and he  tried getting some bulk links for his site and it did more than good. When testing this strategy he saw his site drop from the first page of google to the fourth page. It took him nearly half a year to get his site back on page one of google.

If you are worried about competitors adding bad links to your site than I think the best strategy is to get the best natural back links to combat the bad ones.

[myclicks-163603]

it is really interesting what happens if a competitor starts a bad PR or such a bad links campaign. Large numbers of bad links from totally irrelevant websites. How does google prevent that? Any ideas on that topic?

[AlanMosley]

I have thought about this, it would not be too many companies that would do this, one there is a cost in doing so if you are a small company, also there is a huge risk if caught doing so, I am sure that the costs of getting caught would be huge.