Have You Been Testing For Links To Bad Neighborhoods on Your Site?

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A few weeks back, I came across a great article by Ana from Traffic Generation Cafe. In this article she talks about searching for and removing bad neighborhood links from your site. After reading the article, I realized that I had not checked my site for bad links in a while. I normally check all links created by guest writers and commenter’s links. But every once in a while, one could get by.

What are Bad Neighborhoods Links?

Before I go any further, let me explain what a bad neighborhood link is. If you take a look at Ana’s article, for the most part, we agree on what we consider a bad neighborhood link is. A bad neighborhood link is any link that leads to a site that tries to trick the search engine ranking system and offer poor content. For information check Google’s policies about linking.

Sites to Avoid

I am very picky when it comes to sites that I link to. When I create articles and links to other sites, I keep the links relevant to the content and use wiki sites and only sites that are popular and small sites that I know and trust.

When it comes to companies wanting to advertise on Evolutionary Designs, I will turn it down it if the site’s services have services I do not agree with. If I wouldn’t use them, then why would I want my readers and clients using those services?

As for those that comment on this site, I moderate all new commenter’s. I will reject any comment that have links to spam, pornography, junk, scraping, dating sites, and most ecommerce sites. Basically in comment that looks it was given by service that offers commenting on sites for a fee. Below is a quick list of what I feel are the most important sites to avoid linking to.

Sites to avoid are

• link farms
• blog sites that scrape content
• duplicate content sites
• sites offering black hat SEO services
• questionable content websites – (sites promoting violence, pornography, and drugs)
• Pay for Surf sites – I do not see these very often
• Safelists
• Affiliate links <— Not necessarily a bad thing, but why should someone make money from your site if you do not give them permission to? Plus its in the comment policy that I will be posting soon. 

How Track Down Those Bad Neighbor Links on Your Site

Before I even finished reading the article by Ana, I was thinking to myself, that it’s going to be a lot of work going through all the links and comments on my site. I figured that at least 99% of my contents links were good or were good at one time, but I thought there was a good chance that a few bad links got through on the comments.

Since I have thousands of comments, I realized that this task was going to take a while and I would have to schedule some time each day to go through all the comments and verify each one. But as I continued to read Ana’s article, she mentions a tool that can help you find those bad links. This tool is Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker.

Bad Neighborhood Text Link Check Tool

This tool is easy to use. All you do is enter in your website’s domain name and it will scan your site. Once its finished, it will list the problem areas and then it will it will tell you if your site passed or failed in those areas.  It also gives you a summary of it findings and at the end it will also give you a list of bad links that it found during its scan.

Does the tool work? Yes, but its not perfect. But its free, and it will find questionable links on your site. Then you can figure out if you want to remove them or leave them. From the screen shoot above, it found 5 question links and all them will be removed, once I can figure out where they are.

Most Common Bad Neighborhood Links

In my opinion, the most common types of bad neighborhood links come from comment spam and trackback spam. To combat this type of links, make sure you get yourself a good anti-spam comment filter, use cloudfare to block the worse spam offenders off your site, don’t be so trigger happy accepting those trackbacks. To cut down on moderating the site, I just disabled trackbacks all together.