This month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. For those of you who are new to SEO, there are various types of links that search engines consider when valuating the importance of your website but for the purpose of this article, we'll stick to 2 types;
1. High quality links (one way links from authoritative sites within the same industry, business you're in)
2. Poor quality, low quality links (one way links from either SPAMMY sites, or sites that just are nothings in the internet world)
According to Google, in order to reduce the "so called" negative effect that one way poor quality links have on your site, this is what you need to do:
1. Linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.
2. If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.
3. It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don't worry and focus on the links that are under your control.
4. Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.
5. Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google's ranking algorithm.
6. If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.
