BigDave - 7:25 pm on Apr 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

Percentages,

From the start, I have linked to two sites that were banned/penalized. When I looked at their source I could even see what some of their problems were.

One is now out of business and the other is now back in the index.

My links page with these two links on it should have been a PR4 at the time, and it was a PR4 with these links. That is two links out of about 100.

Now if you link out from a page to penalized sites that are marked as a bad neighborhood, and it is a high enough percentage of your outbound links, I suspect that the *page* with the links might get hit, but not the pages that link to the page that gets hit. If that was the case the entire web would be one big bad neighborhood.

The problem is when you are viewed as a *member* of a bad neighborhood. If you join the link farm, or most of the sites you link to are members of a link farm, you might be considered a member. Otherwise, you are just someone with a couple of links to sites that just happen to be in that bad neighborhood.