Bad Neighborhood Links - What makes them bad?

In my experience i believe bad neighborhood websites have one or more of the following attributes:

- Porn / torrent sites
- Participate in black hat / unethical techniques
- Link farms - Jam packed with irrelevant links

stay well away from these during your back linking campaign and you'll be just fine.

Danny

Porn alone doesn't make a 'bad neighborhood' site. They have to be doing something else that violates Google TOS such as doorway pages etc. which are common in porn, pharma and a few other areas due to the intense competition. Now, it could be bad to have a lot of links pointing to your site using certain words since that might get your site blocked by firewall and 'net nanny' type programs but this doesn't have anything to do with Google.

Links from spam sites, known farms, banned scripts, malware sites and the like won't hurt you in most circumstances, they simply won't be counted. Google understands that you don't have control over who links to you. If these links were counted and suddenly aren't, it might look like a penalty but it's not. In some rare cases where there is a clear pattern of spamdexing the target site will get a penalty but this is apparently something that's manually researched and applied. Now, if you're linking to those sites that might cause you problems but I assume you aren't doing that.

My take on what's happening to your site, absent other data about it, is that since it's new you're seeing the effects of QDF (Query Deserves Freshness).

I'm not sure if this applies in your case or not. But I'm reading a lot about not having consistent backlinks coming in, but also not having consistent (human interaction) on your site.

"Human Interaction" think adding new useful content to your site along with the backlinking. Doesn't have to be every day but once or twice a month and be sure ping the new content.

I have launched several new sites over the last 7 months and each one has been indexed and been driven steadily up through the search engines. I have 2 of these sites now ranking on Google page 1, position 4 and 8 for 2 different keywords.

Ken Leatherman

The Old Geezer