Prior to Big Daddy, everyone said get links and more links. So my question is, should we still do this? How do we know we are not linking from a bad neighborhood? thanks for any advice.
Bad neighborhoods means don't link to poor quality websites out of your niche... sticking to finding links within your niche. Or from trusted directories. Also you might need to run some backlink checks on your partners that are within your niche to make sure they are not linking to "bad neighborhoods" gambling, porn, etc.... Stick to this advice and don't worry about the Searchengines.....Find quality link partners within your niche and try to acquire one way links....if not then recips are ok. Build these links a little at a time and a slow pace..... Build quality content and update as often as you can. The best links are given and not asked for. I think what people are concerned about is "are recips going to hurt me now".....NO....not if you link to the right people and for the right reasons. Recips are what the WWW is all about so Google should never totally hurt website for having them.
I would hang fire on your linking strategy for a few weeks to see where G goes with the Big Daddy update / re-indexing / sitemaps disaster of the last few weeks. Many webmasters (here and on other forums) think that Matt Cutts may be talking more about what he would like G to be able to do than what it can do at present, and he has lost a position of trust by being too quick to dismiss shocked WM's who complained to him about thousands of their pages dissappearing from the index. He said spammy links in and out and dup. content were responsible (the same old same old in other words) but it turns out that other G staff are looking into things a little deeper (see older posts) as the low quality link filter (if there is one) seems to have been set way too high and has caught thousands of genuine content sites. The third most important person at Google is Eric Schmidt and he says quite simply that the G. servers are full. That would explain all the sites dropped from the index a whole lot better than MC's magic bullet against link spam & paid links. The Yahoo directory is a paid link for chrissakes! I have a hand edited directory as a side project. 2 weeks ago 377 pages were indexed now 8! Spammy? Decide for yourself (PM me for URL) but I know that a big competitor (UK finance industry) is still doing very nicely from a site wide on a 60K page site so i'm staying on the fence until I can see whether we are in a new era of whiter-than-white hat only tactics or just suffering from a blizzard of misinformation.