SEO Pitfalls: Outbound Links to Bad Neighborhood Websites

Google judges a website’s value, in part, by its outbound links. High quality links can improve search engine rankings. Low quality links (links to bad neighborhoods) may lower rankings, or even get a website penalized or banned.

By evaluating current and future outbound links, you can avoid “guilt by association” penalties. Many of these practices also indicate that the website has little actual content or value, so by following these same guidelines you can decide whether a link will be valuable to your audience.

What constitutes a bad neighborhood?

Bad neighborhood websites may:

• participate in link exchanges meant to artificially inflate their position in the SERPS.
• spam blog comments with links to the website.
• serve up different content to search engines and users (via user agent cloaking or JavaScript-based redirects, for instance).
• excessively repeat keywords in an effort to make the page rank higher (called keyword stuffing).
• contain hidden text or links.
• have a large number (100+) of outbound links on a given page.
• duplicate existing website content (like ripping content from a forum post or another website).
• host illegal content.

It’s important to note that some of these practices have legitimate uses. For instance, some websites:

• serve up different versions of the same content for the sake of browser compatibility or accessibility.
• host a large list of quality, relevant links to tools or reference sites–for instance, a list of free photoshop brushes. The links are valuable to visitors.

Some webmasters take a factory-style approach to web design and monetization by building hundreds of websites and spamming blog comments and forums. They aren’t worried about being banned for spam or deceptive practices—they have hundreds of other sites to fall back on. That’s one way to do things, but my interest is in techniques for long-term website growth.

Choosing outbound links

A good place to start is with Bad Neighborhood’s text link checker. This tool only evaluates 40 pages, so you may not see every outbound link. However, it’s a good place to start.

First check your own domain, then continue to use this tool for every potential outbound link. It will tell you:

• if a site has a large number of incoming links on blogs (look for the blog spam icon). This could mean the person is an active participant on a number of blogs, or it could mean they’ve spammed blog comments in order to increase the number of backlinks to their site.
• if a site has any 404 (not found) outbound links. Too many 404 links can lower search engine rankings.
• how many links exist on the page (link density). A high number of outbound links could mean that the website is a link farm, so you’ll want to investigate further before linking to them.
• if the web domain has a server-side redirect. Usually not a problem, but you’ll want to check to be certain the website isn’t redirecting to something irrelevant in an effort to trick visitors, for instance to an e-commerce or affiliate page.
• if the website contains certain types of questionable anchor text. The tool lists all such occurrences at the bottom of the report. Often times, the tool flags anchor text that isn’t really spam, so be sure to check the context.

Website design and content checklist

You can’t make decisions based solely on a tool. Here are some other things to check before linking to the website. Visit the website and consider the following:

• Overall web design. Is the web design attractive? Is the navigation easy to use—can you quickly access the website’s resources? If you can understand HTML/CSS, check out the source code. Poor design can indicate that the site was thrown together without much care, which could mean the website was thrown together solely to make money.
• Excessive advertising. For instance, does the site have annoying pop up advertisements, or banner ads with audio? There are other examples, but you’ll likely know immediately if the website’s advertising is obnoxious.
• Website copy. Is the copy well written, with a minimal amount of misspellings and typos? Some people intentionally use common misspellings to rank for competitive keywords. However, it can make the content harder to read—at a minimum it makes the website look amateurish.
• Keyword stuffing. Does the website use keywords too often to be natural? Keywords are an essential part of SEO, but it’s important to include them without effecting readability.
• Hidden text or links. Rather than spamming their content with keywords, some webmasters hide the keywords or links by making them the same color as the background. You can check for them by selecting all the text on the page (Shift+A on Windows, Command+A on Mac), then scrolling the entire length. Any text that wasn’t there before? It’ll be pretty obvious, usually just 100 different variations on the website’s keywords.
• Link quality. Check out the website’s outbound links. Do they link to a link exchange website? Avoid linking to them. Are the links off topic? They may be paid links (Google penalizes for these).
• PageRank. Does the website have a PageRank? If the website isn’t ranked or has a rank of 0, it could mean that the website has been penalized for deceptive SEO practices. It could also mean that the website is new.
• Is the website indexed? You can check by going to Google and typing in: site:www.thewebsite.com (replace with the domain you are evaluating). If not, that’s a bad sign unless the site is very new. The website could be banned, which means Google has already decided that the website is trying to manipulate their search engine rankings.

These factors have to be considered in context, so use your best judgment.

Avoid link exchanges

Did you get an email or forum message requesting a link exchange, but you have no idea who the sender is? Skip it.

It’s considered bad form to email people randomly and ask for links, and people who do this are likely using other spamming techniques to get attention to their website. Often times, these requests are sent out via mass emails. Most people ignore the request, but perhaps a couple will link to them.

Following these guidelines will help to ensure that you don’t end up being penalized for linking to a disreputable website. Don’t forget to evaluate the links on your website regularly—this will ensure that all of the links are still valid and still offering quality content.

Tags: bad link neighborhood, bad neighborhood, google, links, search engine rankings, search rankings, SEO

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under SEO, internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.