There are many reasons why a website may not be getting the results you think
it deserves. The sandbox effect means a site requires time to be trusted by
the search engines while duplicate content should be replaced with unique,
high quality SEO content. Another possible reason for worse than expected SEO
results is a phenomenon known as bad neighbourhood linking. Outbound links
are not considered a factor in improving SEO but they do offer genuine resources
to your customers and a link exchange with a very high profile site may have
its own traffic based benefits.
Outbound Links
While adding outbound links will not improve the SEO effects for your own
page, adding too many or inappropriate links can certainly have a detrimental
effect on any SEO campaign. You can’t control every link that comes in to your
site but you should make sure that you closely manage every single outbound
one to ensure that they are to relevant pages and are not considered to be
in bad neighbourhoods.
Search Engine Penalties
Search engines may not penalise you for receiving links from bad neighbourhoods
but they view a link from your site to another as being a “vote” for
that site; an indication of the quality of the resulting page. By linking to
sites in bad neighbourhoods you are indicating to search engines that you either
condone the poor quality content or are you attempting to manufacture improved
results for one or more undeserving pages. Either way your SEO campaign is
likely to be penalised as a result.
What Is A Bad Neighbourhood
The question of how to determine the sites that are in bad neighbourhoods
or are blacklisted by the search engines still remains. In order to ascertain
whether a site is a good link or not, you need to check its contents. Never
link to a site that is little more than spam or a blatant link exchange project
with no other value. Search engines use blacklists that are regularly updated
with new sites added and others removed.
Checking The Search Engine Index
As well as looking at the content on a page, check to see whether it can be
found in the Google index and the indices of other search engines. Type the
website address without the www at the beginning into the search box and if
there are results from that site then it is indexed. This, at least, means
that the site hasn’t been blacklisted or removed from the search engine index.
Essentially you need to consider whether the linked page really does offer
value. Would you read it yourself or would you be happy for your visitors to
read or view the content? If not, then don’t link to that page.
Links And SEO
Links are one of the biggest factors in determining SEO success. You are unable
to control exactly who provides a link to your pages so search engines will
not penalise you on the grounds that you have received links from bad neighbourhoods.
However, if you place links on your own pages to any blacklisted or penalised
pages you run the very real risk of facing a similar penalty applied to your
own site. Only link to high quality, indexed pages.
