Seo Advice: Bad Neighborhood on the SEO estate

A question we often get asked is “How do you know if xxx.com is a good site for linking purposes?”. The question refers to both incoming and outgoing links. As with many SEO matters, the advice cannot never be concrete but is littered with maybes and ambiguities.

In general, you want to attract good quality inbound links by offering excellent content on your site. Similarly you want to be a good samaritan and include “recommendation” links for external sites which offer additional complementary information.

It is inevitable a good site will be approached by other webmasters / seo engineers requesting an exchange of links. Our advice is NOT to exchange links for the sake of exchanging links. In most cases, they often offer a link on a resource page / link / partner page. Typically, there will be a long page of links to a variety of sites with no apparent theme. Do YOU see any value in such a page? So how do you think Google views such a page?

So check potential link partners and proposed link pages thoroughly. Do they offer any value to a user browsing such a page? Is the content good? Is the content related to the theme of your website? If yes, then maybe consider a link exchange …. but first check THEIR linking policy.

Bad Neighborhoods

Google do not like you linking to sites that are considered “bad neighborhoods”. One expects that an incoming link from a bad neighborhood site will not be counted against you by Google, as your competitors could have a linking strategy to find bad neighborhoods and set links to YOUR site and ruin your reputation! However, your recommendation of a bad neighborhood site will reflect badly on your site. So how can you check whether a site is considered a bad neighborhood?

Fortunately, there is an online tool available to evaluate whether a site is a “bad neighborhood”. Of course, the tool comes with disclaimers but in general is a very useful tool for evaluating potential partners. The tool is located here:

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm