Can linking out to a weak site harm my sites SEO?

[theLotter]

We have an affiliate that wants us to link to his site to help him get started.  His website looks okay and is in the same niche as us.  However, he has PR 0 and no Page Trust.

We could work in a natural looking link in a news article, but there is no way he could be considered any kind of "authority" link.  Can linking to his site harm us?

[TakeshiYoung]

Linking to low quality sites can harm your site, especially if they are considered "bad neighborhood" sites such as porn, pills, and casinos.

That being said, if you think this site is of high quality and believe they will eventually grow in domain authority, by all means link to them. Every site has to start somewhere. Just be aware that Google judges the character of your site by the sites that you associate with, so choose who you link to wisely.

[MoosaHemani]

Linking to low quality sites is obviously harmful but a website with 0 PR is not considered to be low quality or weak website.

I think if the website is within your niche and you really think that this website is going to grow and attain lot of natural links in the near future… I think you surly should link to that website!

The only reason you should avoid linking to that website is because the current link profile is bad (i.e: links coming from porn or different spammed websites)

Hope this helps!

[MarieHaynes]

I would have no problem making this link.  I never look at a site's PR to decide whether or not I want to link to it.

Here are two things that might make me consider my decision:

1. If it was a site that I would not want to be visiting in front of my mom then I'd likely not link to it.  (i.e. porn, gambling, buy viagra, etc.)

2. If this was becoming a pattern then I would be concerned.  What I mean by that is that you need to be careful that your site doesn't become a glorified article network that exists just to link to other sites.

[NakulGoyal]

Great answers here already. All I'd like to add is: If the Search Engines did not exist / SEO did not exist ? Would you still link to them ? Are you going to be leading traffic to them ? Do you want to do that ?

I totally understand why the affiliate wants it. The question is, would you want to do it ?

[irvingw]

just nofollow it and then you can link to any site you want without worrying about anything. Link anywhere you want and it won't harm your site if it's nofollowed.