How to determine a bad neighborhood?

also: PR0 despite DMOZ link?

[blaize]

I am wondering if there is a way to determine bad neighborhoods - does it have to do with PR0? I ask this because I am in the process of requesting links with other sites, and would like to know whether the sites linking to my site are 'bad neighborhoods' or not.

I am also wondering if it is possible for a site to have PR0 despite having an inbound link from DMOZ.

[mil2k]

PR0 doesn't necessarily mean "Bad Neighborhood". What people mean by that phrase are link farms and free for all sites which give link to anybody and everybody. Your strategy should be to use your keyword and search google. then look at the backlinks of the top 5 sites and ask for reciprocal links. If you get one way links all the better!

[James_Dale]

Having a link from DMOZ doesn't necessarily mean you will have a noticeable increase in PR. If your site is new, a good strategy for increasing PR might be to obtain links from high PR pages with few outbound links. If your category on DMOZ has many other listed sites, the PR allocated to each link will be smaller.

In general, the PageRank allocated to each link on a page is roughly 0.85 x that page's PR divided by the number of links on that page. PR is a multiplier, which means that once all the on-page factors have been considered, they are multiplied by the PR score. The factor of multiplication is not known, since PR is linear (despite its representation in the Google toolbar).

If your site is new, your PR is probably less than one, but not absolute zero. Either way, you won't see much registering in the toolbar. A score of absolute zero is usually a penalty, the implications of which are:

all on-page optimisation factors multiplied by zero equals zero.

Good luck with your reciprocal links!