Where Do Your Back Links Lead? - Bad Neighborhoods
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The most obvious bad neighborhood is the one I mentioned at the beginning: a link farm. Even sites that merely look like link farms, with pages and pages of hardly anything but links, are bad neighborhoods. Even if it doesn’t explicitly have the words “link farm” in it somewhere, it’ll have nicely arranged rows of links to sites which might not even be organized in any particular manner or include descriptions of any of the sites. If one approaches you and asks to link to you, just say no.
There’s a variant of the link farm that you should definitely stay away from: free-for-all sites. FFA sites are almost like classified ads for web sites, except you list your site for free. You typically get to include a two-line description of your site along with the link. You might also encounter an FFA blaster, which will tell you that they’ll send your ad and link to thousands of directories, for free – FFA pages, in other words. Well, they probably do send it out to that many sites…but you’re not going to like what you get back.
Since the content of FFA pages is constantly being updated with new ads (many hold only 50 and rotate old ones off as new ones come in), your ad could be on the page anywhere from a few minutes to about a week. So you may or may not get many people to notice you. What you will get is tons of spam in your email inbox! Some people continue to receive spam literally years after a single use of an FFA blaster.
Some “bad neighborhoods” online have something in common with what we’d consider to be bad neighborhoods in the real world. If you own an ordinary e-commerce site, you really don’t want to have a link on a site that is oriented to sex or gambling. Pharmacies are considered to be savory places in real life, but many of them are more than a little shady online. You can probably figure out for yourself what kinds of sites should not link to you. (For bonus points, you might not want to have a link to your site on a web page that links to those kinds of sites).
There are other ways you might find yourself stuck in a bad neighborhood. For example, unless you’re on a dedicated server with your web host, your site is probably sharing space on a server with a bunch of other sites. You may have no idea what kind of sites those are. Ask your web host about the sites, then do a blacklist check. You don’t want to be on a proxy server with a spammer or banned site.
Next: Avoiding Any Impropriety >>
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