Outbound Links & Bad Neighbourhoods

How to monitor?

[johnser]

We all know its bad to link to a site that has been in a link farm / spam network etc.

If you run a directory site with 1000 pages of original content and every page links to the top 3 authority sites in Google for that phrase (eg DMOZ sites) what happens if all of a sudden, one of these "Authority" sites gets a penalty?

Manually checking your 3,000 outbound links on a weekly basis is not very practical but would our whole site be affected or just the page linking to the "bad" URL?

TIA
J

[troels nybo nielsen]

AFAIK it is not dangerous to have a limited number of links to "bad neighbourhoods" if you have a large number of links to "healthy" websites.

But IMO it seems to be a rather questionable practice to let your linking policy be decided by ODP or Google's SERPs. I do hope that you have checked those websites manually before you linked to them.

[AjiNIMC]

I guess the Google programmers have taken care of that, it might not fetch you a ban but certainly some negative points but dmoz will score enough good points to overcome the negative shadow.

Aji

[digitalv]

Do you have to link directly to those sites? Set up an ASP, PHP, or Perl page that does a redirect for you.

Example: link to www.yoursite.com/redir.asp?url=www.yahoo.com

Clicking the link will take the user to Yahoo, but you're not "linking" to Yahoo from your site as far as Google is concerned.

In ASP the code for "redir.asp" would look like this:

<%
response.redirect "http://" & request.querystring("url")
%>

[nkakar]

Ive done a website based on a script that has internal links to my other pages on the same site, yet nopages link to each other, they all link to a page that doesnt link back to them and is not being linked from anywhere else.. eg. test1.htm has a link for a widget that goes to test1a.htm, which has the link for the same widget going to test1b.htm and so forth..

is that a good idea? i did this so theres no cross linking and multiple pages of the same content with different urls.. let me know guys

[trimmer80]

AFAIK google counts those redirects as outbound links now . It can read links that have a url in it (url=www.yahoo.com).
Unless people think the http:// is required for it to count.

[hutcheson]

The ASP-redirect trick for true outgoing links isn't a good way of avoiding bad-neighborliness. In fact, if it works at all, it will merely trick Google into thinking that a neighborhood is more zenophobic than it actually is -- and zenophobia is one of the critical tests.

[johnser]

>>>>it seems to be a rather questionable practice to let your linking policy be decided by ODP or Google's SERPs.

I agree but we're doing this as a test to see the value in having lots of specific on-topic outbounds which are viewed as Authorities in Google's eyes. Theme-wise, it will help us a lot & PR wise it won't.

But Google is not going on PR at present AFAIK
J