Florida SEO Marketing Firm > Links and Link Neighborhoods

Linking and the Link Neighborhood

The Internet's neighborhoods aren't what you were used to growing up with Mr. Rogers.

I'm pretty confident that you understand the theory and practice of links and how they work online to interconnect webpages so I won't get into the technical aspects of it. Instead I will focus on the benefitial aspect of a link and how it applies to improved search rank through search engine placement services such as the one my Internet Marketing company offers.

A typical link neighborhood..

You'll often hear "avoid bad neighborhoods" when reading Internet forums, articles or talking to other internet marketers. If you press the question fewer will actually be able to describe what that mythical bad neighborhood is.

Generally speaking most everyone knows that linking to a black-hat or rule breaking website is a bad idea. However being in the same neighborhood can hurt you as well.
"But I haven't linked to a bad site, why would that hurt me?"

To really understand what's going on you need to understand some basic black hat seo techniques.

Without going in to too much depth hear let's assume you share links from a few websites that are also linking to a black site. The black site has is doing a pump and dump, generating thousands, possibly tens of thousands of links to multiple doorways. The sheer amount of spam will reverborate down the chain and can effect even those innocent websites while the search engines are unclogging the mess. Guilty by association, even more so if you are using lists or directories that the black hatter is using in the automated submissions and spam.

It's even more important to check who you are linking to of course. You should check to see who that website links to, and where their links are coming from. If the majority of their incoming links are from blog comments this is indicative of spam. Similarly with forum posts, guestbooks etc. These should only make up a small percentage of any websites incoming links.