Bad neighborhood

Bad neighborhood


The broad definition of a Bad neighborhood is a network of web sites that have an irregular amount of penalized or banned participants for various reasons. Such networks will at some point of the chain link to web sites that are or were involved in Link scheming, hosting spyware, malware, offensive material, or have been involved in illegal activities such as phishing.

Known issues


Linking to, or in special cases being linked excessively from a Bad neighborhood may categorize a web site as a part of the network, however accidental or 3rd party linking is usually either discounted, or averaged to the overall linking pattern of a domain. In rare cases a minor penalty may be issued instead of a direct and full ban to bring the problem to the attention of the webmaster.

+ Resolution: Avoid linking to or being linked excessively from a Bad neighbourhood. Identifying such pages can be done by checking whether they've been banned from Google, by doing a search on their domain name, or by using the site: or info: operators. No information on the domain name, and/or a nonexistent PageRank ( especially for otherwise accessible internal pages ) are good indications of such web sites. If you find that you're being referred to by such a web site against your will, and that the page in question is still indexed by Google, make sure to report it through the Google Webmaster Tools' spam report utility. However while linking to such domains will most likely raise a penalty, and lower the overall trust of your own web site, being liked to from a Bad Neighborhood against your will, almost never has any effect on your ranking. Exceptions are only when there's an indication ( even if it is false ) that the source and the target are affiliated in any way.