links

Do links from other websites which are good websites, not penilezed in any way but not related to your website be used? Does google count those or penlize a website for having them? I know its best to keep the themes tight but can you use other subject matter links?

I dont think there is any penalty. Most of the people I know have links from a variety of themes and there is no punishment. Naturally, having something in your theme will be more beneficial to your customers, but nonetheless, even the non themed sites will be beneficial to your link strategy (At least for now <g>)

Every inbound link helps, relevant or not. The only caution is to make sure you do not do any outbound links to anyone in a "bad neighborhood."

taking it further I try not to outbound link to any irrelevant links period! Incoming no problem, you cant control who links to you, so how could you get a penalty for it?

I look for on-theme relevancy before I will do an OBL. Have made exceptions as favors, but otherwise no.

I doubt google would ever penalize just for OBLs being unrelated.

think about it. SEOchat links to a hardware site, a scripting site, an ASP site, and a hosting site.

you really think they're going to start punishing something like that?

As I stated in a prior post in this thread, Google will not penalize you for OBL's as long as they are not to sites that are penalized or banned, i.e., "bad neighborhood" sites. Just don't link to sites that are or have the potential of being penalized or banned, adult contet sites, link farms, etc.

My site has the luxury of natural links, so we do not normally link to another site unless it is really relevant to our site. I have hundreds of inbound natural links, but currently only have outbound links to eleven sites.

Ok thanks i feel a little safer now accepting links from other subjects