"Bad Neighborhood"

[nmjudy]

I recently came across an URL (I thought in this forum) where you can test to see if your website is hosted on a server that has been blacklisted for spam.

I heard somewhere that if your site is hosted on such a server, Google may not index it or penalize you for being associated with a "bad neighborhood".

Does anyone know for sure if this is true! Also- the URL I'm trying to find again allowed you to type in your IP address and it would tell you the server name it's hosted on and how many 'dings' it had against it for spam. Anyone know of the site I'm talking about? I was quite surprised at some of the results.

[ciml]

There was a time when you could infer blacklisting status from the info: search but I don't think this has been the case for some time.

Google has been known to deny listings on a per-domain basis, but not as far as I'm aware on an IP basis. Some hosting companies have hundreds or thousands of independent sites on an IP. 'Servers' are often blacklisted for email abuse, but that's different.

If you are concerned about a particular domain, I think the best approach is to email [e-mail] but keep in mind that Google's immense popularity causes a considerable demand for support.

[martinibuster]

I think we need to define what a "neighborhood" is, and what it refers to. I posted something similar in another thread but it pretty much seems to have gone over their heads because I don't think they understood it.

Bad Neighborhoods are always spoken of in the context of Links:

In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web...

Google states that bad neighborhoods are those collections of sites that engage in activities for the purpose of increasing their search engine rankings.

Reciprocal links generally create topically relevant neighborhoods. A quilting site may link to a website dedicated to quilting during the American Colonial Era. The Colonial Era Quilting site may link to a Canadian Quilting Guild, and so on. These are naturally occurring neighborhoods that, link for link, create a neighborhood. These are called "good neighborhoods".

Ask Jeeves looks for these naturally occurring neighborhoods because it is assumed that like minded sites will naturally form communities, and if you aren't in one of these communities, your site must not be worthy/relevant for that community. Your site is very likely not going to be much of an authority, if the neighborhood doesn't embrace you.

Google not only keeps an authority score (inbound links), but a hub score (outbound links) as well. Just don't link to bad neighborhoods.

The way I see it, there are bad neighborhods, and then there are gray area neighborhoods that you don't really belong in. They're not necessarily bad, but you really don't belong in them because they may cloud the relevance of what your site is about.

If your quilting site is reciprocating links with beer distributors, record labels, hotels, and rest homes, what do you imagine a search engine is going to think your site is about?

I'm not sure to the extent that Google factors your "neighborhood." They certainly use the rhetoric of neighborhoods in conjunction with links. Ask Jeeves is on record about using neighborhoods as part of it's sauce.