SEO Blog

Bad Neighbourhood links can seriously affect your search ranking in the major search engines like google, yahoo and msn. If you are linking to websites who are consider as spammers or ‘bad neighbourhood‘ by the search engines, It might give a negative affect to the ranking of your page.

An official from Google Inc. has recently made a comment on ‘bad links’ and how they affect your web site rankings on Google.

What is a bad link?

Google is not fond of the following types of site:

1. The renowned Web spammers
2. FFA (Free For All) sites
3. Link Firms (Automated Linking scheme)

What does Google say about bad neighborhood links?

In an argument in a SEO forum, Google’s Adam Lasnik has recently clarified what Google looks for in regards to bad neighborhood penalties:

1. Outbound links and Google’s supplemental index are not related
“It’s unlikely that your outbound linking is causing your pages to be listed in the supplemental, rather than main index.”

2. Google looks for patterns of bad links
“Also, be assured that we’re not looking to penalize folks for a ‘bad’ link here and there. Rather, our algorithms are tuned to look for patterns of ‘egregious’ linking behavior… both on individual sites and in the aggregate.”

3. You should always check and verify all the links on your web site
“It’s certainly in your users’ interest that you regularly audit outgoing links on your site (especially prominent ones) to ensure that you’re not losing folks’ trust by sending them to inappropriate places or 404 pages. ”

What does this have to do with my website?
Since Google looks at the linking pattern, if you accidentally link to a bad neighbourhood you might not be penalized. However if you do it purposely, there is a high possibility that your page will simply fly away from Google. Sometimes many 404 error page gives ranking problems. So always make sure your user can get to every single accessible location.

The following 5 companies represent the top search engines.

GOOG Google owns Search Engine google.com

YHOO Yahoo owns Search Engine search.yahoo.com

MSFT Microsoft owns Search Engine live.com

TWX AOL Time Warner owns Search Engine search.aol.com

IACI Interactive owns Search Engine ask.com

SEO Company has released four Advanced Webmaster SEO Consulting Packages. To celebrate this release we are slashing our Super Link Package (SLP) to 50%! That this price the SLP requires you try one of our 8 Webmaster SEO Consulting packages. Jump on this special Now!

I will be at the SES Conferences in Toronto on April 25th and 26th. I am looking forward to meeting in person some of people I only know by email and phone. If you are planning on going to either the exhibition or the conference then look me up if you like.

I emailed and phoned around trying to find some free passes but there is none to be had. The best you can do is get the priority code from one of the Exhibitors which gives you 20% off of the conference price. I got my priority code from Website Services Magazine.

Website Services has a new magazine that is geared toward Webmasters. Check out the current issue if you like. They also have their back issues online. If you like what you see online you can get a free subscription and if you don’t want to wait email John@WebSiteServices.com and he will mail you the current issue.

For all you Canadians I would also suggest you pay in US dollars seeing how the conversion rate they are using is 1.25 and the Canada dollar is down around 1.13 these days.

All the best and I hope to see from friends there.

Brett Tabke has his shopping list in hand and I think is hunting a new co-lo in Austin. Sounds like a pesky backhoe cut a fiber and caused one of the main Cisco routers to fail and the failover didn’t flip over correctly.

So webmasterworld.com server as cut off from the world and worse yet, sounds like their DNS server was at the same location so the DNS can’t be pointed to another server.

Brett says - “This will never happen again. “