Hey all. I recently found out that I purchased some bad neighborhood links for my site. I am basically a noob but I am learning fast and realized these links probably destroyed my SERP position. I have removed the links that were in the bad neighborhood but they are still showing up when I used backlink checkers. How long does it take for them to drop off? When they drop off will my SERP's improve? My other links are pretty good but I think Google penalized me for these bad neighborhood links. How can I tell if I was penalized?? Also, if anyone out there wants to shoot me any SEO advice for my site, Ill PM the link to you since I can't add it yet. Any tips would be great.
next time the bots visit those pages where you had those links, they will disappear from your link profile, however, getting penalized for "bad neighborhoods" doesn't work like that, you can get penalized if it is your website which is linking to the BAD sites, you won't be penalized if bad websites links to you, but you won't have great rankings either, so don't worry about those links and start getting quality backlinks from now on.
Funky is correct. The ONLY way you'd ever be penalized for inbound paid links is if they could PROVE you bought them yourself. And about the only way they could do that is if you were dumb enough to brag about buying them while logged into Google's WMT possibly on their Help Forums so they could tie it directly back to you. Google typically penalizes the seller of links. The buyer only gets penalized indirectly because they typically continue to pay for links that no longer pass them any link juice.
Thanks guys. What's the #1 thing to improve SERP results for key words? Link quality, age of domain, combination? From what I understand, you can get links with fairly nice page rank, like PR5+ but if it has a bunch of outbound links, you share the page rank so it's not as good? How does this work?
Getting backlinks from bad neighbourhood is not something that we can control. Sometimes, our competitors will insert our links in bad neighbourhood too. How you know that you get the penalty? Google is changing PR for many internal pages from high authority sites. Probably, your backlink value drops either from their pagerank or you might be sharing high outbound links from a single page. We are initially sharing pagerank value from from dofollow and nofollow links. It doesn't matter that that particular page with PR5+ have 300 nofollow links and only 10 dofollow links. We will only get the value of 1/310 from a PR5+ page. I suggest you to read trough www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ Try to concentrate more on your quality backlinks, you will see the results either in pagerank or google serp ranking. Quality backlinks: - low outbound links (nofollow and dofollow) - related to your post - anchored keyword backlink - long domain age - frequently updating their contents - good page's PR value
atniz said correctly Make sure there are less no of outbound links in the site/page where you are linked ...and i think atniz has told all other criteria
Thank you all for the tips. It will help a lot. How long does it usually take to go up in page rank from say a 1-2 to a 3-5?? Seems like google is slow to update the PR's lately....
Google update pagerank within 3-6 months once. For last two years, it has been updated every 3-4 months once. Last update was in June 09. Next update is expected by end of this month. It is totally depending on incoming and outgoing links. Do a simple math, if you have 100 dofollow backlinks from page's PR 5 (each page with less than 20 total outbound links) and your blog give away outgoing links of 100 dofollow links to other sites (PR5) which means you are giving away too many link outwards. Control your outgoing links from your blog, always make a good interlinking within your blog pages especially those related posts and make sure it is dofollow link. And try to build consistent dofollow backlinks from high PR pages. You will see some positive results, but no one can give accurate assumptions.