Intuitive InSite

Am I reading this wrong, or did Google just say what I’ve been thinking all along?

from Google's Webmaster Help Center

"Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on
analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and
relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to
you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can
indicate its quality and popularity."

- and -

"It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that
matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links "

So - if a flock of porn and viagra sites link to your perfectly nice, normal, non-pornographic, non-viagra site - those links CAN (and do as far as I can tell) have an affect on your sites search ranking. Right?

Right! So now what do we do to stop those uninvited and negatively impacting inbound links from happening in the first place? Obviously the standard response of ‘create original content’ does not apply here.

And what about if those links are from your own AdWords ad - which Google is displaying on spammy sites. Is Google taking this into consideration at all?

It would not be un-reasonable to ASSUME they do - but we all know what that can do. And I DO still see inbound AdWords ads links from some really just horrible spammy sites, link farms, directories, etc., on a daily basis. I do use the ‘block’ function to try and avoid this, but someone’s gonna have to prove to me that this works - so far I cannot tell that it has any effect. I still see the same ‘players’ appearing in the stats.

Google? Anyone?