Bad neighborhood question

[ownerrim]

Question: if a site is penalized for inadvertently linking to a bad neighborhood (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?

[webnewton]

Logically speaking yes. B has itself become a BAD site because it link to bad neighbourhood C. If you link to B there is a possible dange of it being penalised(especialy if any two or all three site are on same or simmilar topic)
Why would A want to link to B anyways.

[sit2510]

>>> Why would A want to link to B anyways.

Because A didn't know that B link to link farms C and B got penalized after A exchanged links with B.

>>> 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?

I think possible, but in reality, it is unlikely to occur unless you are very unfortunate to have high percentage of bad neighborhood sites.

[dirkz]

You need more than one link to bad neighborhood to become bad neighborhood.

If the penalty worked backwards through arbitrary levels millions of pages could be penalized all at once.

[ownerrim]

well, if that's the case, site A could fully engage in reciprocals, but link out from site B which is also owned by the owner of site A.

Example: you have a site called widgetadvice.com. You solicit for links and offer reciprocals on widgetadvice-links.com which is owned by the same person. You do this in an upfront manner and what you are really doing is offering traffic to sites who know--and can easily see---that widgetadvice-links.com is the link vehicle for widgetadvice.com

This would not work if you are trying to get reciprocals from sites whose webmasters are actively trying to get reciprocals for the purpose of building PR. But most webmasters are oblivious to PR (I had a two hour conversation with one yesterday who does new site design for mom/pop businesses and she didn't even know what pr was).

But it would work if the other site just wants to be on your links page and doesn't care if the links page is on widgetsadvice-links.com versus widgetsadvice.com

This would be a way to go after reciprocals in mass without the risk of another sites penalty flowing back to your site, in this case widgetsadvice.com. The link site might be at risk, but that's not your revenue source so no huge loss