You wouldn’t want to live next to the Playboy Mansion or have Jenna Jameson as your best bud, would you? Well, it might be fun at first, but eventually the parties, the noise, the stints in the Betty Ford, the general debauchery and unsavory characters would affect your home value and lifestyle. I mean, Grandma Fern, the Pastor’s wife, might think twice about coming to your Thanksgiving Day feast if you were also inviting Ron Jeremy. The same goes for the web. The credibility of the other sites hosted on the server with your website and those sites you link to are just as important to a search engine as your own site’s integrity. 

Here’s our shout out of the day to a great article on “bad neighborhoods.”

Living in a bad neighborhood

For example, if your site is sitting on a server with XXXXPorn.com and the neighborhood spammer, BuyViagraToday.com your credibility to an engine decreases because they consider you as “living in a bad neighborhood.” The best case scenario is you can’t increase your Page Rank or raise in the SERPs no matter how much you spend on SEO, backlinks and magic web rank beans. The worst case scenario is that unbeknownst to you, BuyViagraToday.com sends out a spamtastic email and gets himself banned from the engines. Oops, some engines don’t just ban him- they ban every single domain on the server with him. So, your domain just got labeled as a spammer and blacklisted even though you didn’t do anything wrong. Hey, if you’re gonna get banned- at least have a little fun first! I would.

How to know if you’re site is living in a bad neighborhood

Everybody loves cheap hosting, but you do have to weigh the cost of being in a bad neighborhood against the price of quality hosting on a server that will allow your site to flourish. Learning what the crime index of your server is before you move in is just as important as knowing what it is when you move into a new house. There are a bunch of technical ways to do this, but the easiest and most effective way is to simply read the terms of service of your hosting company or ask them flat out “do you host or tolerate spammers or porn/illicit content sites?” Most reputable companies will not allow this kind of site on their servers, however some still do, so ASK!

One of the best ways to circumvent this whole “bad neighborhood” issue to use a Real Estate specific hosting company. Oh, yes, do not adjust your screen, I am actually recommending those dreaded template-type site companies for hosting. (Don’t get me wrong I still feel that they have serious problems but hosting isn’t usually one if them.) Why? Because you know all the other sites on the box are real estate related and they probably have a very strict terms of use agreement. So, go crazy real estate template site hosting company, go! You have got my seal of hosting approval.

Linking to a bad neighborhood: If you lay down with dogs, you will get fleas

While inbound links to your site can come from anywhere without downgrading your value to a search engine, outbound links (those links that you place on your website to other websites) can degrade your credibility to an engine. If you link to “bad guys,” Google might think you are a bad guy too. So how do you make sure you aren’t linking to substandard websites? A simple, one-step test you can perform to see if you want to link to the site is to check the site’s Page Rank at NUAH. Simply type in the URL and click go. It might take a few minutes but you will have the Page Rank of every crawlable page on the site. You only want to link to sites with a PR5 or above unless you know the owner of the site well. 

If you hang out with bank robbers, eventually you’ll be donning a Ronald Reagan mask and pointing a gun at a teller yourself. At least, that’s what a search engine thinks.

As always, here are so tools to help you with your quest to link to solid citizens on the web:

Banned site checker

Bad Neighborhoods Website

Good site for seeing if you are linking to bad neighborhoods.

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