Avoiding The Bad Link Neighbors

Links are crucial for a website’s ranking on the search engines. The more quality links a website has, the more it will be considered as relevant and thus, be given higher ranking. But do you know that some links may actually hurt your website’s ranking instead of increasing it?

Incoming links from a suspicious website will have a negative impact on the ranking of the website receiving the link. The search engines consider suspicious websites as bad neighborhood. Once your website receives or exchanges a link with a bad neighbor, it is considered as part of the neighborhood and may receive the same penalties as the other websites.

Who Are The Bad Link Neighbors?

Because of the impact of linking to bad neighbors, webmasters and web marketers who want to earn decent and quality links must be able to identify who the bad neighbors are and avoid them at all times. How do you know which websites to avoid?

• Identifying Link Farms




Link farm is considered a bad neighborhood. A website participating in a link farm is considered part of the bad neighborhood even if the participation is unintentional. One way of detecting link farm is following the links of a suspicious website. Look at the links of the website. If there are several unrelated links and then the websites they are linking to are also returning a link favor, then the website must be participating in a link farm.

• Spammy Websites




Don’t link to a spammy website. One way of identifying spammy website is going over the source code and looking for suspicious codes or hidden texts. Websites performing keyword stuffing is also a bad neighbor to link to.

• Banned By Google




Websites that have been banned or penalized by Google are considered as bad link neighbors. Avoid linking to these kinds of websites. You will be able to identify whether a website is banned or not by entering the URL address of the website on Google search box in this format: site:www.name of the site.com. If the result shows nothing or just the homepage of the website, then probably the website is banned or penalized.

Links are important if you want to get higher rankings for your website. However, remember to link only with quality websites. Links from a bad neighborhood will do more harm than good to your website. It is necessary that you check and analyze the websites first before linking to them. Unintentional or not, linking to a bad neighborhood leads to search engine penalties.

The search engines are looking for quality links. Need quality links to your website? Please see our Link Building Service. For more information, please contact our Expert Link Builders or apply for a Free Website Analysis.