Bad neighbourhood

**mrcrowley** · 05-10-2007, 07:06 PM

I never really considered bad neighbourhoods before, other than not having dozens of adult links on a none adult website.
I tried the tool at bad-neighborhood.com on my directory just as a matter of interest and it spewed out a bunch of links which it claimed as questionable.

My question is how serious should i take this?

Here's 1 example this is an internal link.

Questionable:
Found on: AllSkyTV Directory
URL: http://www.allskytv.com/Games/Gambling/
Anchor text: Gambling & Betting

I assume gambling is considered as bad neighbourhood because its banned in america? So the rest of the world should consider it as unfriendly and immoral too.

This actually effects pr??? I think thats a bit nuts...

I don't know too much about bad neighbourhoods so i would appreciate any information that would be enlightening.

Thanks!

**OldWelshGuy** · 05-11-2007, 08:30 AM

Rather than make a long post, hopefully it is Ok to send you to a blog post I made some time back

Old Welsh Guy The Google Expert Â» How to Identify a Bad Neighbourhood

Have a read then come back and ask some more questions.

**mrcrowley** · 05-11-2007, 10:27 AM

Thanks very much appreciate it.

**mrcrowley** · 05-11-2007, 10:54 AM

Thanks OWG had a good read...

I already check my links before i add them (links, pr, indexed pages).

I won't add a gambling site unless it is pr 4+ (or a very impressive page) simply because theres too damn many of them, this helps cut the ammount down a bit and i only have the quality ruputable ones.

I found this paragraph the most useful:

These are simple checks designed to help answer the question of ‘am I linking to a bad neighbourhood’? I can not tell you how important it is that you vet your linking partners. There is a lot of false information about bad neighbourhoods, including stuff like. I don’t link to gambling sites because Google doesn’t like them. Google doesn’t care about the genre of sites, it cares about the specific practices that each site and cluster of sites uses. Sites like ‘William Hill Bookmakers’ are not banned, nor are they bad neighbourhoods, yet they ARE gambling sites. Sure gambling sex and pharmacy sites are more likely to get into bad linking practices and spamming, but if you are in the same business, then they are on topic links.
One last thing though. When linking, keep these questions in mind. Am I linking to and from the most relevant pages of the sites?. Is this link on topic? Will I get traffic from this link? I am NOT saying you have to stick to the sites where you can answer yes to all, but I AM saying that if you CAN say yes to all those questions, then you will have just given your internet marketing a big boost.

I think its amazing the number of webmasters who fail to realize some of these points. They seem to think that all risque or other adult natured sites are bad links. So in my summary its safe to add what links you want as long as they are good links and fit into the topic. Correct me if i'm wrong of course.