SEO Junkie

The term “bad neighborhood” refers to a site or group of sites that have been penalized or can be penalized anytime by search engines for using unethical techniques to inflate their rankings.

Craig Wilson defines bad neighborhood as:

“A bad neighborhood is the name given to a single web site or a collection of web sites that either use spam techniques or host material that is deemed to be of an unethical nature. To have your site associated with one of these types of sites can cause your site to slip in rankings, when requesting a link from a site or linking to a site, make sure the site is what you deem to be ethical.”

What Exactly Constitutes a Bad Neighborhood?

There are certain things that search engines do not like which are called spam techniques. These techniques are all about tricking search engines robots and using those spam techniques which are strongly prohibited by them.

Whenever a search engine algorithmically tracks or is reported by a surfer about such site that is using unfair means to get their rankings and doing things that are forbidden, it either lower its rankings or completely or partially delist it from its index. Thus, it becomes a part of bad neighborhood.

These are some, but not all, of the spam techniques that are strongly prohibited by major search engines that can mark a site as bad neighborhood:

• Hidden text or links
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Excessive keyword repetition
• Duplicate content
• Doorway / gateway pages
• Linking to FFAs (Free for all) or link farms
• Little or no original content
• Deceptive affiliate content
• Excessively cross-linking
• Excessive Pop-up windows
• Adult content for non-adult search
• Machine-generated page (cookie-cutter)
• Deceptive title/description
• Illegal content
• Pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware
• Misuse of competitor names
• Registering misspellings of well-known websites
• Deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience and so on

How do you spot a bad neighborhood?

To verify whether a particular site is bad neighborhood in the eyes of a search engine, run this query there:

Yoursite.com

and

Site:Yoursite.com

If it does not return any results, then it is most probably penalized by search engine provided that it is not new when you check its domain registration date at http://www.whois.sc.

Is Linking to Bad Neighborhood Bad for Your Site?

Yes. If you are linking to a site or group of sites that are part of bad neighborhood, then your own site can experience low rankings or even get delisted from index altogether, depending upon trust level that your site has built overtime in the eyes of the search engines.

In addition, you should not link to a site that is linking to bad neighborhood or it will affect on your rankings.

Are Links from Bad Neighborhood Bad for Your Site?

No. Search engines know the fact that it is something which is not under your control.  Therefore, you shouldn’t be concerned about being liked to from bad neighborhood. Google even states on its guidelines page:

There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.

In short, you need to ensure that you are not linking to any site which is part of bad neighborhood or which is linking to bad neighborhood like FFA and link farms.

Google has recently been sending email notifications about penalties to the concerned webmasters. Now it has incorporated it with ‘Google Site Maps’ and added many new features like.

• Report spam
• Reinclusion request
• Indexing Summary
• Crawl Errors
• Add A Sitemap
• Query Stats  
• Crawl Stats
• Page Analysis
• Index Stats
• Top Search Queries
• New Help Center

Accorting to Matt Cutts,

The Webspam team and the Sitemaps team have been working together for several months on a new approach: we are now alerting some sites that they have penalties via the webmaster console in Sitemaps. For example, if you verify your site in Sitemaps and then are penalized by the webspam team for hidden text on your pages, we may explicitly confirm a penalty and offer you a reinclusion request specifically for that site.

I’m really happy about this new way to communicate with webmasters, even though it is a test for now. If the initial results are positive, I wouldn’t be surprised to see us gradually broaden this program.

The catch is that Google won’t be informing each and every website which is penalized as Matt further pointed out:

Our program to alert webmasters by email has been successful, and this new program is a natural extension of that, but we’re still testing it. We are not confirming every site that is penalized for now, and I don’t expect us to in the future.

After all, the ideal search engine should help site owners debug and diagnose crawl problems and tell legitimate site owners when they risk not doing well.

While analyzing the domain names of thousands of websites appearing in the top rankings in the Google results pages for a variety of search phrases, I noticed that there is only a VERY small number of websites at the top which have more than 2 or 3 dashes in their domain names.

I have a hunch that Google uses an excessive number of dashes in the domain names to detect spam and the websites in question must have to pass through an even stricter spam test. And it goes without saying that most such domain names are registered by the ‘hit-and-run’ spammers to rank well in Yahoo! and MSN in the short run.

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t seem out of the question. To identify spam, all major search engines are known to have devised such flags that when triggered put a possible spam website to a relatively tough test and either completely delist it or lower its rankings once it fails and is successfully identified as spam.
 
So, in my opinion, it is better to create a sub-domain on an existing website without many dashes than registering a domain with plenty of dashes therein. Or better yet, register short, easy to remember domain names without dashes.

Finally, I have got this blog up and running. When everyone else is doing it, why can’t I?

Joking aside, I started this blog to share my knowledge about search engine optimization with other SEOs and to talk about current happenings in the SEO circles. There sure is a lot going on in SEO that needs to be talked about.

In addition, I will be posting my SEO tools from time to time.

Well, If you (unfortunately) happen to be a complete stranger to SEOJunkie, feel free to read About SEO Junkie to learn more about me.

You can contact me by sending an email to sufyaaan (AT) gmail (DOT) com