I was doing a little reading on SEO and I found an interesting post from a fellow blogger/logo designer by the name of David Airey.  His work is phenomonal, and his articles about design are definitely worth their weight in word count.  His post from about a year ago talked about why he got penalized by Google (which cut his unique view count by 75%).  The long and short of it was that he had been linking to sites that would fall into a ‘bad neighborhood’, or he was hosting ads by a site that was falling into a bad neighborhood.  I made a post about being careful about my link exchange partners, but didn’t really think that linking to particular types of sites (blogs) would be harmful to my page rank - even if the blogs I linked to were of similar, relevant content.

He linked to a website called Bad Neighborhood - http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm.

This website will analyze any site you input, and analyze its network of links.  Not only sites on the page you enter, but further down the line - ’six degrees from Kevin Bacon’ style.  If you link to a decent site - that links to a bad site - its duly noted.  If you link to blogs and they  link to you its essentially ‘blog spam’, or a bad link exchange.

Lesson learned:  Watch your links.

If you’ve been involved in adsense or adwords you’ve probably noticed that when you’re hosting ads (AdSense), or your ad is hosted on another site (AdWords), your direct site IS NOT linked to.  There is a ‘Google Middle Man’ that does some pretty simple redirects, but (I hope) this helps us from not creating a bad neighborhood between my site, and the sites that happen to end up on my site due to my implementation of AdSense last week.