SEO Tool – Are You Linking to Bad Neighborhoods?
You probably have heard that linking to bad neighborhoods can ruin your online reputation with the search engines. If you are trying to optimize your web site (called SEO or Search Engine Optimization), you should pay attention to your link targets.
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. (A quote from Google Webmaster Guidelines.)
Often it is very obvious which link is good and which link is not good. If the links points to some bad site or a site that is doing something fishy, you are doomed if you link there. Also sites that use questionable techniques are not recommenced as online friends.
But sometimes the badness of a link can be nicely hidden. Here is an example:
The other day I found a comment on this post High PR Web 2.0 Properties for Link Building in SEO :
Looked to me like a relevant comment. I checked the URL and it looked fine too, so I went ahead and approved the comment.
Fast forward to today. I found this little tool on www.davidairey, to check good and bad link neighborhoods:
Text Link Checker Tool. I keyed in my domain and wham - it spit out all my links and gives some data on it. To my surprise I learned that I was linking to a bad neighborhood:
I thought “that is strange”, I am not aware that I ever linked to that domain. “Was my blog hacked? Did I use an infected plugin?” Well, nothing that serious. I scrolled up and found this:
As the comments on this blog are nofollow anyhow and this particular page (fwisp.com) is only a bookmarking page, that can be used by anyone, there is no real danger in it. But I added bad neighborhood link checking to my routines for all my sites and all my customers sites.
If you hire an SEO company, remember to ask them to also check your links according to this.
Brilliant commentary about google. I’m honestly quite astonished that that has not really been articulated before to such a great length.
To spammers they just don’t get the ethics and manners of making the Internet a place of value. This is a great post because people that are sincere may fall into the temptation to just post anywhere and everywhere thinking it will help them, not.
Thanks once again HP
Bill
Hi Jury,
Just use common sense. If the site that you want to link to is not suitable for all audiences, you should in doubt refrain from linking there.
Also is the site tries to install things on your computer or has excessive pop-ups, I would not link to that. You should also look at the content: is it good or is it very radical or mixed with hate or does the site promote illegal or borderline legal things or activities.
HP
There are many tools to check that whether the backlinks to a site is from bad neighbourhoods. Links from bad neighborhoods can destroy the reputation of a site by Google. So be careful not to buy links and link to a bad neighborhood.
I’m doing some local search optimization for companies in the Netherlands and I’ve never realized the impact of bad neighbourhood links.
I’ve used the tool on my old site and I found some old redirects I hadn’t fixed yet. I repaired them immediately. This tool might come in handy!