Effect of 'irrelevant' link

[John Dawson]

We have been offered free hosting for 12 months (as a startup). The quite reasonable condition for this is that we put a link on our site to the hosting company. However a colleague is concerned that having an 'irrelevant' link on our site would affect our SEO ranking, Is there any justification for his concern?

 

[Community]

To be painfully honest, if it's a serious business, then you should be investing in what matters from the outset and not looking to do things on the cheap.

Reasonable hosting to get you off the ground, isn't expensive and should be something you have full control over for future growth. So in my opinion this shouldnt even be a consideration .

 

[John Dawson]

To be painfully honest, if it's a serious business, then you should be investing in what matters from the outset and not looking to do things on the cheap.

Reasonable hosting to get you off the ground, isn't expensive and should be something you have full control over for future growth. So in my opinion this shouldnt even be a consideration .

Thanks for your reply. However we did not choose this provider because of the free offer; this just came as a bonus. In fact this is a provider that I have had good experience with over several years, and the predecessor to the current start up benefited from free hosting as a registered charity.
I am always wary of 'free' offers, and I do know TANSTAAFL. However this appears to be a smart marketing tactic: investing in the potential revenue generating customers of the future.

 

[Community]

Hi John,

It's great that its a provider you trust, but still the benefit is greatly one sided in that providers court. Obviously this also depends on the link in question, its anchor text and how its presented.

Personally id thank them for the offer but pay for the hosting rather than have a credit link in the footer. But thats me speaking as an SEO as some advice, the tactic is one i've used and have gained links from in similar fashion before, so as a marketing point of view yes, it's done.........but equally can be taken advantage of.

 

[Angel]

Because search engines view all of those connections as proof that your material is valuable, backlinks are essential to SEO. Search engines are more likely to expose your material in search results if more websites link back to yours, which raises your score for the linked-to subjects.

As you go down the list, you'll notice that some websites only have 22 connections to their home page, while the majority of pages that really rank just have two backlinks or fewer. For this website, a suitable backlink aim would be 25–75 links to the homepage and maybe 0–5 connections to the page that wants to be rated.

 

[sophiaadams]

Hi there,
The presence of 'irrelevant' links on a webpage can negatively impact user experience and SEO. These links divert visitors away from relevant content, causing frustration and potentially increasing bounce rates. Search engines may also penalize sites with excessive irrelevant links, affecting their search rankings. To maintain a user-friendly and SEO-optimized website, it's crucial to ensure that links are contextually related and provide value to visitors.