I sell text links on my blogs. However, recently I have had reason to believe that my blogs could suffer if I sell links to the wrong kinds of websites, and the wrong websites. What tools would the hive mind recommend to check if a potential link-sale client website is bad for me? I used http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/ and wasn't impressed. It seemed too simple and wouldn't identify any websites as "bad". Do you have a checklist to verify if a potential link-sale client's website you are linking to is bad? How do you decide whether to link to a site or not, in doing business? Thank you!
There are no "bad" neighbourhoods, there are just neighbourhoods that are incompatible with your current one. The point of the bad neighbourhood idea is that if you are linking outside of your theme and/or category it may end up diluting your link strength either given or received. The other is the co-citation effect, where it makes it more difficult to categorize your site. This means that what is a bad neighbourhood for you may not be for me, and vice versa. However I've found that if you're running a vaguely "legit" site you may want to avoid these, unless your content is relevant to them: - gambling (not "bad" necessarily, but so competitive) - dating, online dating, casual encounters - MLM in any flavour/"earn $$$ from home!"/affiliate businesses that only exist to create affiliates - Mortgage/refinance/cheap loans/credit check service(? not sure about this one) - Real Estate (if not in the real estate business, again, competitive) - Pornography of any stripe - online pharmacy/rx/"research chemicals"/Viagra/Cialis - mesothelioma - free automated Link exchange services (google bias) Perversely the bad-neighborhood.com site is full of real estate and gambling adwords for me. I'm not sure if that means they don't know what they're doing, or they know exactly what they're doing. Neat capcha though.
SO basically you are saying that regardless of the kinds of links I have going out from my blog, my pr and google merit will not diminish? Somehow that doesn't seem right...