How do you know if a site is within your "neighborhood"?

What is a neighborhood?

[richlowe]

within your neighborhood

I see this kind of statement quite often. Yet I've never seen a definition anywhere.

What is a "neighborhood" on the internet?

How would one know what his neighborhood was?

How does one know whether or not a site is in a "bad neighborhood"?

Is the "neighborhood" concept something algorithmic or more of a gut feeling?

Thanks, Richard Lowe

[iamlost]

Neighbourhood can have several internet meanings:

One: sites hosted on the same server(s) as yourself ... regardless of Domain Name ... likely share an IP range. So if a SE or site "bans" an IP range because of (for instance) a spammer in your hosting/IP neighbourhood you may well be collateral damage.

Two: your regional or local geographical site interest location. All sites commenting on or actually in a particular city or state/province might be considered in the same geographical neighbourhood of interest irregardless of actual host server locations.

Three: your subject matter (i.e. web design) can be thought of as a specific subject/content neighbourhood that lumps you in with web designers all around the world.

These are not unique separate meanings ... they can be combined and sub-divided and I am sure there are others but these are the common ones ... determine the actual meaning of each occurance by its context.

[richlowe]

Thanks, but none of these really make sense in the context frequently used. People refer to "linking to bad neighborhoods" as if it was a grouping of sites. This seems to refer to some kind of SEO technique or link farms or something like that.

Anyone else?

RIchard

[PatrickDeese]

Basically any site that shows up for a related: query is in that neighborhood.

related:webmasterworld.com [google.com]

generally relations are formed via recip links, inbound and outbound and sometimes third party links: for instance if you were listed in dmoz and yahoo under widgets then another site in those directories might get listed under your related:domain.com search.