Forum Moderators: open
After finally being able to install the toolbar, I checked PR on all the sites I had on my links pages. These are topic related, helpful resources and much of the time reciprocal.
I found several with gray-out ranking. These were from fine websites, but who were using "link master" type outsourcing. These links have been present on my pages for several Google updates and I've had no repercussions. Just to be safe, I removed these listings as a safety measure against the "bad neighborhoods" penalty.
I'm waiting for the angry emails.
I did a similar, long due, check on our website recently and we found about 5-10%.
not PR-grey, which is Ok in my view.
It seems that some sites who once had helpful, on-topic links pages, for whatever reasons, have resorted to outsourcing to link-farm type services who give them a sub-domain or even cloak the URI so the page appears to still be at the same domain.
IMO, it is dangerous to continue to link to them.
