Bad Neighborhoods and SEO

If you follow linking, you’re familiar with “bad neighborhoods.” And if you run good content on your site, you know how quickly your site can get picked up in these neighborhoods by scrapers. A recent thread at High Rankings discusses just this fact. A few comments from Rand of SEOmoz:

I noticed I have at least 10,000 sites if not more that are scrapers linking to a client’s site. The problem is, too, if you’re ranking well for thousands of queries because you run a blog and articles up every day/week, you’re going to get tons and tons of scraper links…

More:

I’ve seen some evidence of the “bad neighborhood” links affecting one of my sites - in Yahoo! particularly. Paid for inclusion to get it looked at by a person and they put it back, but scary for a while and based solely on the inbound links.

Also, in my interview with MSN (at SEOmoz), they noted that if spammy sites point to you, you “look like spam”. Sounded to me like they take those links seriously and don’t buy the “can’t control who links to me” argument.

Countering it with high quality, legit links seems to be a good way to make sure it can’t hurt you long term. Once About.com and Topix and del.icio.us/popular have you on there, and your natural link love is built up, I doubt that bad ‘hoods can throw you down.

Good point. The search engines shouldn’t penalize for links in, but they sometimes do.