Linking to Bad Neighborhoods Can Ruin your PageRank

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Did your website or one of your webpages drop in rank recently (both in page rank and keyword rank). It could be the result of linking to a bad neighborhood. A bad neighborhood is a site that the quality search engines won't link to. Google's Webmaster Guidelines states:

"In particular, avoid links to web spammers or 'bad neighborhoods' on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

WHAT IS A BAD NEIGHBORHOOD?

(following words are misspelled on purpose to prevent this page for being tagged as a bad neighborhood)

Link Farms (automated linking and uncategorized)
Triangular Linking Schemes (you link to my other site and I'll link to your site from this site).
FFA (Free For All Directory)
Gammbbling sites.
Pooorrnnnoo sites.
Sexxxxxxx and ADDUlt sites
Web spammers (keyword stuffing on the page or in the code)
Websites that have been banned by Google (gray page rank bar)

You may not receive a penalty or drop in keyword rank for just a few bad neighborhood links but it's not safe to take a chance. Delete anything that looks suspicious.

You can check the links visually but then you have to check the all the outgoing links of the site you are linking to also.

Here is a tool that checks sites for Bad Neighboorhoods. However it is not flawless. It will show bad links for sites that have links to innocent articles warning about Poooorrrnno and Sexxxxx and Gammbbling and even tags SafeSurf as a bad neighboorhood because they have an article doing the same. Christian sites discussing the same are really in trouble according to this tool. I used to have a FreeFind search tool on my site but they had bad neighborhood links so I removed them just to be safe. And I've seen the same problems with Stat Counter linking to questionable sites. The owner of this tool states that when warnings show up it's just an indication that you need to do further checking on that site yourself, not that you will be banned for those links. This tool will also show you where there are 404 errors (broken links) to sites you are linking to so it's useful in that respect.

If you know of a more discriminating tool please let me know.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 3-9-08
All Rights Reserved