link question

[ownerrim]

Question: if a site is penalized for inadvertently linking to a site gone bad (you linked to someone two years ago, someone bought that site for the pagerank and turned it into a link farm or
something just as bad), does the penalty stop at that level or does it work backward even further?

A-->B-->C

In this example, the link farm is C, the site being penalized is B. A linked to B which has been penalized. Is A (which is oblivious to what has happened to B) in any danger?

[bhartzer]

As far as I know, the penalty is really only for sites that trade links with each other directly. You can't be held responsible for anything that another site does or, in this case, who they link to.

[ownerrim]

ok, but what if you own both A and B?

[sit2510]

>>> ok, but what if you own both A and B?

In normal circumstances, your site B should not get penalized if you reciprocate links with only 1 or 2 sites that later turned out to be link farms and got penalized. If your site B got penalized by linking to site C, then this means that there are too high percentage (2-digit figure) of sites Cs type that you had reciprocated in the past.

There are 3 scenarios of your past action (either 1 or combination of 3) that I could think of:-

1) You exchange too many links from one single partner
2) You exchange links with too limited number of link partners
3) You exchange links with too many crappy sites.

This would help to answer your specific question. Your site A would not get genalized if there is only one penalized B, but many B's will cause your site A the problem.