The Easiest Way In The Universe To Know If You’re Linking To Bad Sites
August 24th, 2007 by CourtFrom a search engine optimization standpoint, the worst thing you can do is link to sites that are questionable. Linking to sites that have been banned or penalized by Google can hurt your search engine rankings. If you link to very many sites like that, you could end up getting banned yourself. Get banned or penalized by Google and it’s going to really damage your internet marketing efforts.
The problem is that some sites become bad after you link to them. Smart spammers develop legitimate sites first, and then turn them into processed food factories. In order to preserve your search engine rankings, you need to make sure that you aren’t linking to that type of site.
Bad Neighborhood Link Tool
Here’s a tool that you can use to determine if you are linking to sites you shouldn’t be: bad neighborhood link checker. All you have to do is type in your URL and click ‘check URL’. Depending on the speed of your computer and internet connection, it could take up to 30 minutes for the tool to finish. Don’t worry, it doesn’t take up a lot of processing power, so you can work on other things while it works.
I think some of you will find that you’re linking to sites that you don’t want to link to! Get rid of those links and you’ll be in a lot better shape.
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August 24th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Is it possible for certain posts to be penalized and not your whole website? If so what can cause the penalties other than bad links? I think some of my posts are getting penalized but i don’t know how to check for this. Any ideas?
August 24th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
The main cause of that is simply lack of authority. When your site is new there just isn’t enough link juice to go around.
If your posts are in Google’s index, they probably aren’t getting penalized. Your site just needs to get a lot more links.
August 24th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
The only reason I ask is because for two different keyword phrases i am going for i have a category page link to my site that shows on the 6th page of the search results and a tag page that shows up on the 8th page of the search results. The actual articles that were on the first page of the search results for a couple weeks each are not in the top 50 pages of the search results. That seems a little odd because the competition is really really weak for both keyword phrases. I am just wondering is all. I will get to work on getting more authority for the site as I trust your advice Court! Thanks!
August 24th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Also I was wondering if you knew if there are any website niches that are protected or controlled so new competition cannot enter the market for that niche.
August 24th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I don’t think so Mike! You can create a site about whatever you want, so I don’t think that could happen.
August 24th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
That’s excellent news. I am starting another site and just wanted to make sure the niche wasn’t being controlled by the government.
August 24th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Probably useful for a quick check before link exchanging with someone. However, it had a couple of flaws: it stops whenever it should scan a https page; and it does not ignore nofollow-links.
August 24th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I noticed that with the secure pages! It’s good that it doesn’t ignore nofollow links though because they don’t mean anything to other search engines. It’s better to be aware of bad outbound links even if they have nofollows on them.
August 24th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Actually, it’s not supposed to be stopping at https pages, that must have recently just started happening. Do you guys have an example URL that it is hanging on that you could email me please? Address is in the footer of the pages on the site, thanks.
August 24th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Hi Michael! If you run my home page, you’ll notice that it hangs on a PayPal link. I have to remove the link to get it to finish the entire scan!
August 24th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Somehow it stopped after scanning only 40 pages of my site, and I don’t think I have any secure links to get in the way. Anyway, I’m glad to know from out of those 40 pages it DID scan, I have no questionable links. Thanks for letting me know about this great site, Court - it’ll definitely come in handy.
August 24th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
You’re welcome Tay! It sounds like the guy that made it is trying to make it work a little better. It still works well enough to use though!
August 24th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Hmm, I’ve noticed that with all of my sites, the only “questionable” links are on statcounter.com.
Unfortunately if you use their service you have to link to them, which wouldn’t be a problem (hey, they are providing a terrific service for free, so they deserve the backlinks) if they weren’t linking out to spam sites.
August 24th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Good catch! It sounds like Michael fixed it because of you!
August 24th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
I just noticed another benefit to using the tool - it helps you to find broken links in your site. Turns out I had 2 broken links on one of my sites that I wasn’t aware of.
August 24th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Very true! Broken links = bad. Thanks for your insight!
August 24th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Liz, I added StatCounter today earlier to a safe list, that should no longer be showing up as questionable.
Tay, yes, the tool is capped at 40 pages currently. That is intentional.
Court, thank you, I will use that to debug, hopefully this weekend.
August 24th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
You’re welcome Michael! It’s already a useful tool and if the last bugs get worked out it will be awesome. Thanks for creating it.
August 26th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Awesome, thanks!
August 24th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Thanks for this I found it most useful
August 24th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
You’re welcome Wendy! Thanks for the visit.
August 26th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Court, thank you very much for letting me use your site as a guinea pig, the https error has been resolved.
It was actually a little more complex, and had to do with only certain urls. The Paypal one just happened to be one of the ones that it had an issue with. All better now though.
August 27th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Very cool Michael, that’s for taking care of that!
August 28th, 2007 at 5:35 am
[…] The Easiest Way In the Universe to Know if You’re Linking to Bad Sites […]
August 29th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
When I run this program, I see that someone I’m linked to is linking to some shady sites. Does it hurt my site if the site I’m linking to is okay, but they’ve linked to bad sites?
September 3rd, 2007 at 5:55 am
Nice tip. The tool seems to be down at the moment, hopefully it’s not permanent.
I’ll look to see if there is a similar tool out there and post if there is.
September 5th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
mlanton (and everyone else, for that matter), I just moved the site over to VPS hosting, and it is back up now. I had a 48 hour outage due to the previous hosts fubar. Hopefully that will not happen again.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Great tool - thanks for sharing!
May 10th, 2008 at 9:16 am
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