(Entry was posted by Gidon Belmaker on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/10/2013).

What about links from low quality sites?

Hi guys,
Quick questions about links.
What is the effect on visibility if lower quality sites - aggregators and user-generated scraper sites- link back to my website? I get some referral traffic from some sites and I don`t know if I should encourage them or if there is a negative search effect?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Nishant Desai: Usually bad links will harm more in rankings even if it will give you traffic. ;You can temporary allow those links for traffic but ensure that those links are not permanent. ;Once you have organic traffic from better sources, request them to remove your link.
Gidon Belmaker: This leads me to another question

The obviously bad site are easy to identify, and I don't want anything to do with those.
The sites the are confusing are site who pick topical news aggregator who summarize and link back to my stories. Most are humanly picked but some are rss based.

Will those kind of sites have a negative effect?

Thanks
Gidon
Sent from my iPhone
Ranu Jain: I would strongly recommend you to disavow those spammy links.If these links are helping in sending traffic then it may be just a matter of time before Google cracks down even further and gives no weight to those low quality backlinks. With the recent algorithm updates and penalties, you will have to change your link building strategies.