Does your website get downgraded if you link to a lower quality site?

[jamesjd7]

My site has a pr of 4.  My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques.  I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.

[Jinx14678]

Probably not, although if he is acting unethically is this someone you want your customers/perspective customers seeing you involved with?

w00t!

[jamesjd7]

I see your point.  I know him personally.  He hired someone to build his website and offered him a cut of the revenue that he brings in.  I did a bit of background check on his website since it appeared that he was ranking for a very competitive keyword.  I don't think that he knows that his website programmer which gave him very good ranking for a difficult keyword might be doing it with black hat techniques.

perhaps, i should clarify.  I'm a novice at this.  What i saw was comment spamming with different aliases on very high ranked websites.  I'm not sure if this is black hat techniques.  Also, I'm not sure if this is not allowed.  I didn't think that his seo guy was up to par since he used different aliases to comment.  His username had a link to my friends website.

I hope that this helps to explain the situation and what i saw.

[KeriMorgret]

If you think about this question in more general terms, you'd never see CNN or New York Times link anywhere, since most sites have a lower PR than they do. And on the flip side, if I have a site with very little PR about pinball games, I'm not going to link to a site with a higher PR that's about buying pills that's full of spam.I don't have enough personal experience for your particular situation to offer an expert opinion for this case, however.

[evolvingSEO]

I would look at this in a holistic manner. First of all, why would you link? Is this just for backlinking/ranking purposes?  Then don't do it.

But are you asking because your friend has actual content you want to share? In THAT case, is the content (topic) relevant to the content on your site?  And do you generally only link out to other sites for the sake of sharing the content on them?  If so for both, I don't see anything wrong with it.  And if it is just to share the content, you can just nofollow it too for added "security".

But if its just to try and get your buddy a link, don't bother.

-Dan

[jamesjd7]

I was thinking about this issue as well.  I would think that pr 9 sites have to link down.  No where else to go.  Plus, pr 6 or 7 sites are somewhat authoritative.  However, I'm just building my trust factor at pr4.  If i link to a pr 2 site and google finds something wrong with the pr2 site, then would they assume that I can't be trusted.

[jamesjd7]

The friend of mine with the pr2 site has some unique content that will benefit my readers.  I conducted an email interview with him.  I like the content and it brings value to my readers.