Linking to Adsense heavy sites?

[AshSEO2011]

Hi SEOmoz community!

Hopefully a pretty straight forward question here...

Does anyone know if linking to "Adsense heavy" websites can have a negative impact on your rankings? Or a positive impact even?

Thes sites in particular are owned by a business aquintance, so they come from a trusted source even though the sites themselves look quite "spammy".

Also they all have pagerank of 1 or 2 and there's about 100 of the sites that we would link to.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Regards,

Ash

[Theo-NL]

It was all good until you've mentioned that you intend to like to 100 'spammy looking' URLs. 'Just a couple' wouldn't have been a problem, but 100 (especially since you'll start linking to them in a short period of time) seems a bit much.

Linking out to bad neighbourhoods is seen as a general negative signal for your position in the search engines. This does make sense from the perspective that in the real world you don't want to be linked to too many bad neightbourhoods as well. Why exactly do you want to start linking to those 100 'spammy domains'?

[AshSEO2011]

Hi Theo, thanks for the quick response!

Hmm, they are owned by a customer of ours, I'm currently searching around for link building companies/freelancers (as we haven't done any considerable link building yet) but as this offer was on the table it seemed a simple place to start!

[CPU]

Hi Ash

This weeks whiteboard Friday covered Negative rankign features and Adsense was featured.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-negative-ranking-factors-whiteboard-friday

At the link you can either watch the video or scroll through the transcript to the Adsense headign to see what was said.

SEOMoz's data suggests a negative correlation between Adsense and rankings.

Hope this helps.

[AshSEO2011]

Hi Lewis,

Thanks for your answer.

Yeah I watched that Whiteboard Friday (on Friday actually) and it was pretty interesting, however, correct me if I'm wrong but that was talking about rankings of your own site? I'm reffering to linking to such sites? Would those links be completely useless? Could they drag us down in the rankings? Or would they be better than nothing (we only have a handful of links at the moment)?

Regards,

Ash