Hi, What is the risk to subscribe to free directories and be penalized for what appears afterwards, a bad neighborhood? Did you encounter such situation? What are the consequences? What should I do in order to prevent submitting to a bad directory ? Thanks.
In my opinion any one can link to your sites, and you will not be penalized for it, but those bad one will not be counted as back link. You need to have some good directories linking to you. If bad sites linking penalized sites, competitors would add each others to those, but i don't think thats the case. Thats only in my opinion though. Thanks
Worst that will happen from any link is it won't count, otherwise you could hire submitters to ruin the site of your competitors.
This is a tricky situation because what nextdir says makes sense but Google also says avoid bad neighborhoods...
Hard to avoid i feel, any site can start out good, end up with a reputation for being a bad neighborhood, yet another thing i wouldn't waste my time worrying about.
I think this can be a little unfair... Yes... anyone can link to you... This means that anyone can harm you... I think it's the same with AdSense... anyone can cause you click fraud problems... I wonder when will Google find a solution for that...
If by "subscribe" you also mean "link back", then there is a risk. But if you don't link back then you aren't associating your website explicitly with that directory, so you won't be associated with any bad neighbourhoods it may be involved with (in theory at least).
Regarding invalid clicks with adsense i think their more on top of that now, they just dont count what looks remotely unnatural. I think theres less risk now of losing your account through someone trying to do damage. Its not who links to you that does so much damage, its who you link to, you cant deny that part so were responsible for that part at least.
Bad neighborhood is another myth that has never been proved. Obviously Google advise to stay away from this but there is nowhere on the internet a fine line to describe what actually it means. Is bad neighborhood when you are on a page with another 100 links completely unrelated to yours? It might be, but what if all those 100 links are quality or authority sites? Is bad neighborhood when you are on a page with 100 links related to yours but low, low quality? Who kows... What is actually bad neighborhood and where is the line between bad and good? Hmmm... I think the key of this answer is relevancy but don't take my word as no one knows the answer for sure. As for being listed in free directories...I would sugest to have a look at every free directory before submiting. Check a few subcategories and see if the listed links are related to the subcategory. When you run a free resource it becomes very hard to review 200 daily submissions and I've see some of the guys just approving everything. In this case check your category - for example "Travel" and see if there are only travel related websites listed in there. If there are...it only means the content of the category (listings) is relevant for the category itself and in this case you may submit as your neighbors are related to your website...but who can say which of those related website are good or bad when it comes to quality? There is no such system to measure the quality and relevancy of a site, that's why everyone builds different stories on the bad neighborhood theme.
i believe the only way you get penalized is if you LINK TO a "bad neighborhood". not if a "bad neighborhood" links to you.
yep, absolutely agreed on this point! but then too many spammy links pointing to a site also gives a bad impression in search engines!! but then if an outgoing link is spammy that could hurt really bad!!
You are absolutely not in control who link to your site. So you can be penalized only if you link to 'bad site' and not if 'bad site' link to you.
I would be my understanding that a "bad neighborhood" constitutes a link on a page that has no relevance to your site. Heres a quick read, oh and stay away from FFA sites. In summary knock yourself out and submit to directories with relevant categories and that are backed up with relevant keywords.
The problem with blog directories and RSS Feeds Directories is that search engine results point to the directory site but the content is yours. For me, just forget directory. There are other ways to create backlinks without relying on directories.
Sure is... Bookmarks, and blogs, and forum links and ..... All you need now is just a "big list" off them to "submit" your site too PS.. good luck with that as i havent seen any "submit pages" on any above mentioned type of sites laterz malcolm
There are directories that are really good. But what I discover is that there are directories that took out a phrase or keyword from your site, and when when the search engine result is out, there it is, the feed or blog directory comes out first, and your site is forgotten down the bottom.
If a directory offers you SEO friendly pages then i see nothing wrong with possibly sending you some traffic so i dont understand where your coming from really... Maybe a little SEO work on your blog will help balance what you seek and place you above the submitted directories that are showing up above your main site in the serps. thx malcolm
From reading that, it makes it sound as if someone stole a keyword that they saw on your website. You just need some extra work to jump place and get above anyone ranking better.
Yes, pipes, that's what I found out. Some sites are stealing keywords from your site. Do you know how to prevent this?
No what im trying to point out to you is that nobody steals words from other sites, that would be like someone claiming to have ownership over the english dictionary. Other webmasters are merely using words, there probably not even optimizing for certain words and often people can rank for something with little effort, something that they were not trying to rank for at all. Many things come into play, for example a page od a site can rank better with PR0 against a site with pr5-6 because other factors have put the lesser pr site up top. You cant stop people using the same words you can try and rank higher by using the various seo methods, for example backlinks, more related content etc. If someone scraped your whole site and you see an exact copy of your site, thats a different thing altogether, it doesn't sound like the issue here though.