Avoiding Bad SEO Neighborhood

Posted by psycho | 1:45 AM | 0 comments »

As an SEO enthusiast, this could've happened to your website. The reasons for such kind of failure can be really varied. It could be the sandbox effect that's causing the trouble. Or it could be the 'bad neighborhood' effect.

Bad neighborhood is oftentimes referred to as overoptimization. Careful analysis of your site and other sites linking to you will give you a clear-cut idea. Overoptimization or SEO overkill could be connected to real life situation. The bad guys and the outlaws should be avoided at all times. This is also true in doing search engine optimization services. So who's good and who's not?

To note, bad neighborhood includes porn and gambling websites, and blacklisted sites performing illegal or fraudulent activities. If you want improved search engines without the risk of being penalized, choose good neighborhood. This neighborhood uses proven white hat SEO techniques, nothing less.

Every website has its own share of hiccups to deal with, whether it is the sandbox effect, over-optimization of your website, or linking to bad neighborhood. Such inappropriate linking by obtaining unlimited back links from link farms is the most dreaded form of manipulating the page ranking and any website that is found to be practicing it is sure to be banned and excluded from the search engine indexing.

Like we prefer going for old wine, instead of new ones, similarly, Google also prefers handling older websites that have been indexed longer with it, rather than working with new websites, most of which are spam sites. So, as soon as a new website comes, Google places it in a sandbox for one to six months, with three to four months being the average time frame for each website to experience this sandbox effect. The Sandbox effect is like putting an employee on probation. The employee will be into the organization, but will not figure anywhere on the surface. He will be allowed to nurture in the background. Even though your web content may be excellent, and even though your website may be having many relevant inbound links, yet until the sandbox effect is over, a new website will not receive reasonably good page rankings for any of its keyword phrases.

While we cannot do anything much about the sandbox effect, we can always dictate the other 2 factors - that is, we can always avoiding over-optimizing our site (through back link bombing or keyword stuffing) and avoiding linking to bad neighborhood.

Never link to websites which are eager to earn money for back links (or exchange backlinks with your website) by practicing unethical activities like spamming, disseminating viruses and pornographic material. Also avoid linking to link farms which are automatically generated pages, which are created with the sole objective of providing backlinks to other sites. However, these pages do not contain anything relevant. You will find just duplicate material, hidden text and links, doorway pages, deceptive titles, copyright infringed stuff, etc on their website. If you allow your website to be linked to such sites, then your site is also sure to get banned or excluded from the search engine indexing very soon.

Instead, if you are really interested in obtaining more number of quality one way inbound links, from older and more reputed websites, then you should stick to other authentic means of obtaining backlinks. You can also prefer using a reliable linking service such as LinkVana, which not only provides complete information about the most authentic ways of website optimization, but also facilitates your network expansion and services like content outsourcing for your website. Just refer to any LinkVana review and see how this linking service has boosted the business of thousands of satisfied customers, by providing them with unlimited links and by expanding their network beyond expectations.


Links are one of the most important factors for high ranking, but if your website link is placed on a bad neighborhood site (a site with bad reputation of manipulating search engines or trying to boost up ranking by illegal techniques), those links would harm you instead of increasing your rankings. Links from unrelated websites and pages and also from FFA sites, can affect the co-citation of your website and can harm it instead of providing any benefit. So you need to carefully evaluate the sites that link to you and get links from those sites only which have a clear status to keep an eye on your own repute and ranking.

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