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Some Link Partners May Be Dangerous

bobmcd asked 3 years ago
One key component of SEO, as we all know, is Links.

This works both ways, outbound and inbound links. If you are linking out to a URL with a bad reputation, that one link on your page can get your site blacklisted, or dropped to PRO by Googlebot.

If you have exchanged links with a site you THOUGHT would be good for yours, it might shock you to learn that some link partners have as many as 100, 200 and even 300 and MORE outbound links on a single page. Anything over 35 is excessive. Pages with more than 100 outbound links (on the single page) is also in risk of being labeled as a Link Farm, and if you link to that site, it could be damaging ALL your other SEO efforts.

One tool I recommend is here:
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

I suggest you first use it to examine those link partners you already link to from your links page. Simply imput the URL of your own link page(s) and read the report as it comes up in real time.

Be advised though, there will be warnings displayed for nearly all urls displayed, as the tool considers Gambling/Casino related websites to be bad neighborhoods on their own. Don’t be alarmed about those warnings.

Instead, be alert as to HOW MANY outbound links are counted on your link partner sites.

Less is More. If you see you have certain link partners who are in danger (anything more than 100 outbound links on any single page is dangerous) of being labeled a “Link Farm”, then it is in your best interest to remove them from YOUR page.

We have no control of who links to us, but we are in control of who WE link to. Disassociating yourself from bad link neighborhoods may be the missing ingredient you need to restore credibility, and better PR, to your own site.

We’re all in this together!
BobMcd

8 Answers
answered 3 years ago
FYI, I wonder how long inbound links will remain so important following Yahoo’s announcement that are moving towards Semantic Web partly to reduce the reliability of link importance. Be interesting to see….ranking sites based on incoming links is a fundamentally flawed approach if you are aiming at quality SERPS so it kinda makes sense.

But then people have been saying this for years and it’s still right up there as a top SEO tip lol <span title=” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

HVDB answered 3 years ago
Hi,

Useful tool, what links should be removed?

Blog Spam?
Link density gauge high?

Goldfinger answered 3 years ago
@Simmo! 157185 wrote:

FYI, I wonder how long inbound links will remain so important following Yahoo’s announcement that are moving towards Semantic Web partly to reduce the reliability of link importance. Be interesting to see….ranking sites based on incoming links is a fundamentally flawed approach if you are aiming at quality SERPS so it kinda makes sense.

But then people have been saying this for years and it’s still right up there as a top SEO tip lol <span title=” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

Is semantic web and natural language search the same thing? I only know that http://www.powerset.com/ is pioneering the latter

answered 3 years ago
@Goldfinger 157191 wrote:

Is semantic web and natural language search the same thing? I only know that http://www.powerset.com/ is pioneering the latter

There’s probably an overlap, but Semantic is more about tying together interest groups and Microformats will play a major role in that.

webber286 answered 3 years ago
Your original post is a bit misleading. Having more than 35 links on a page doesn’t automatically make that a bad page, Google’s guidelines say to keep to under 100 links on a page BTW. You can just go into Yahoo’s directory and see how many links are on some of those pages for proof that it’s not an altruism. Yes, less is more in terms of link power, but not all links are equal. If you are 1 of 100 links on a good authority website that is highly related and a PR5 page, that link will return much more value than if you are the only link on a not so related PR1 page.

It’s hard to imagine that linking will ever go away as it is one of the better measures for the popularity/importance of a website. More likely certain links will be more and more discounted, as has already started happening by Google attacking what they think are paid links.

Nice tool though, thanks for the link. Been looking for one of these since the old bad neighborhood checkers went away.

Inspiration answered 3 years ago
HVDB;157190 wrote:
Hi,

Useful tool, what links should be removed?

Blog Spam? Link density gauge high ?

I see some linking sites with blogspam should i delete them and warn their webmaster ?

Regards
Rick

bobmcd answered 3 years ago
I know Google says 100 outbound links is tops, so I started by removing all link partners who already have more than 100 outbound links on a single page. Then I started removing those partners with more than 60 outbound links on a page. Remember, Google makes its own rules and those rules can be changed at any time. They may be saying 100 today, but tomorrow, they can change that to any number they choose.

There’s nothing that can stop a Webmaster from breaking up outbound link pages to page2, page3, page4, page 5, et.al.. Directories do this everywhere, that is, break their categories into pages with no more than 20 to 30 outbound links on any page.

Have you ever wondered why some Directories get penalized for interior pages? One day they have PR3 for certain categories, and by the next update, they have PR0. What did they do wrong? Chances are, they did nothing wrong except to link to some site(s) that is labeled as a “Link Farm”.

As for Blog Spam warnings on the report itself, that’s a warning to take under advisement. I wouldn’t be too worried about that, or about Social Bookmarks spam. After all, those are supposed to be sites where “Others” are linking to yours. We have no control over those who link to our sites.

Google has created this monster. Let them deal with it. But if they want to hurt anyone for being overzealous, don’t let it be you.

If you have 100 or more outbound links on a page, create a page2, page3 and etc., and start transferring those excessive links to new pages.
You’ll be adding new content to your site, and what’s wrong with that?

Hope the Eggs roll your way!

BobMcd

Engineer answered 3 years ago
@bobmcd 157228 wrote:

I know Google says 100 outbound links is tops, so I started by removing all link partners who already have more than 100 outbound links on a single page. Then I started removing those partners with more than 60 outbound links on a page.

Did you let your link partners know that you were removing their links? I hope so! :1Dialog: