Forum Moderators: martinibuster
So what's a good way to detect bad neighborhoods?
I did check the WebmasterWorld glossary but they do not define "bad neighborhood" at this time. Maybe that's because everyone's definition as to what a bad neighborhood is subjective and varies.
Here's my definition.. A "bad neighborhood" is websites that attempt to improve their rankings in the search engines by utilizing unethical methods such as keyword stuffing, duplicate content or lack of original content, hidden text and links, doorway pages, deceptive titles, machine-generated pages, copyright violations, and that sort of thing.
Link exchange (when done improperly with low relevance and high volume) can be thrown in this list. When the webmaster publishes a poorly organized and high volume of links that have nothing to do with their own site, I would call that site a bad neighbor.
Don't over think this.. when considering if a site is a "bad neighbor", simply look at the site's contents and their links (if they publish a links page). Ask yourself, "does this content improve or better the web?" .. most of the time its easy to determine if a site is quality or junk.
Don't worry about a couple of minor errors.. new webmasters still learning proper webmastering are known to make honest mistakes. I wouldn't call that a bad neighbor. Sites that publish little to no original content on a regular basis and have heavy linkage to sites not relevant to their own are going to fall into the "bad neighbor" definition more easily.
basically if you send out link or link/exchange requests in any kind of progromatic manner it is almost certain you will end up in a bad neighbourhood.
if you exchange links with someone who spams you requesting a link (a spam request in this sense is a request sent to a progromatically scraped email address or a request sent by a web form by a user or robot who is submitting from a list of such pages rather than visiting the site) then you will end up in a bad neighbourhood
[aside: i have 404 pages that were once web contact forms that receive multiple hits a day]
if you send out link exchanges to any old website you'll end up in a bad neighbourhood.
...
stick to exchanging links or asking for links from sites you actually visit and actually like, sites from whom traffic to you would be worthwhile, sites with whom you'd like to be compared with and so on, that way you'll be safe.
it's quite simple ... if you are trying to soak up links for the sole purpose of improving your search engine ranking then don't be suprised if the strategy backfires ... it isn't rocket science.
Those are the obvious ones. It's the ones you didn't mention that are problematic.
According to me if you are linked to less relevant site,
older site,
Actually that's a good sign
less pr site, then it is said to bad neighboured
Title of this thread: So if toolbar PR is usless... PageRank has zero to do with quality of the neighborhood.
basically if you send out link or link/exchange requests in any kind of progromatic manner it is almost certain you will end up in a bad neighbourhood.
It may be that it is not inherently the tool, but how the tool is used. You can hire a team of linkers to do it manually and still end up with sucky results. So it could be said that it's not the tool (software or link monkey) itself that's inherently flawed but how you use them.
stick to exchanging links or asking for links from sites you actually visit and actually like...
I've never been a fan of gut feeling.
try not to link to baaaaaad sites.
We already know not to link to them. The part you left unanswered is what we are discussing: How do you detect what is a baaaaaad site?
The toolbar doesn't have to blow away for this question to become relevant. If you're using the toolbar in any way you've already made your first mistake.
