I've noticed a drop of 10 or so positions for almost all of my monitored search terms in the past couple weeks for one of my sites in google. as i have a directory for local businesses, i'm curious if i might have linked to a site that may be considered a bad neighbourhood. there's probably quite a few hundred links going out, so it's hard to pinpoint when the serp change happened and what links were added, but one thing that is certain is that the serp drop is across the board on all the search terms i've been monitoring. what i'm curious about, if i did link to a bad site, does my whole site get penalised, or is it just the page that links to the site. i'm tempted to use rel="nofollow" on the outgoing links in the directory to see what happens as i've dropped from #2 or #3 to the second page, and obviously my traffic is starting to a suffer a bit. of course it could just be my site and the ever changing serps, but i'm finding it strange that most terms dropped an almost equal amount. thanks grant
Could be a lot of things. If you don't review your directory entries closely though and monitor them I'd nofollow the links.
Most of the time it is the page that you are linking from that will be penalized by the SEs, not your whole site. There are some tools you can use to help you with this. I will try to find links to them and post those.
Don't do a "NO Follow" on a Directory. Google will kill your site! Directories are what they are supposed to be - Directories. By the way you will not get penalized for a bad link due to the fact it is a directory. My God, if this were the case DMOZ would be dead along time ago. As mentioned above, it may filter the page at best. You can only get hurt if you; 1) Site-wide to a banned site. 2) Promote a site that is banned on index page. Hope this helps D