Bad Neighbor Policy
Posted on 12. Dec, 2007 by ComCorp in Search Engine Optimization
The ‘bad neighbor policy’ is also known as the ‘bad neighborhood policy’. The bad neighborhood policy is most used by Google Search Engines as an integral part of its PageRank program. Because Google algorithms place so much emphasis on how popular your site is as compared to other sites where the keywords are more contributory toward the page ranking, it stands to reason that web masters would attempt to collect as many incoming links as possible to boost the page rating.
Entire web sites and directory were set up for the purpose of collecting and reselling links. For a price, you could make it appear that your web pages were being linked to thousands of others, all of whom recognized you as an authority in your field. Therein lies the problem. From these link farms, you were not receiving quality links, just links. So Google began to process of qualifying the incoming links to your site. Not only the number of back links, but the quality of the back links were rated. If your ratings came from a link farm or from a series of reciprocal links, you were considered to be in violation of the bad neighbor policy and your web site could be penalized by a lower ranking or even by banning.
Google has stated that an occasional bad link is not going to result in penalties; it’s the consistent bad links that create negative results for your web pages. Not only bad links, but also dead links leading to 404 pages can be considered as a bad neighborhood.
Ultimately though, your viewers are not going to care who you are linked with so long as it is associated with the subject which they are researching, so that Google or any other search engine considers a bad neighbor only matters in the ranking which your web page receives from the search engine algorithm. For the benefit of your web page visitors, you should be reviewing links and correcting or removing them on a regular basis. There is some software available to assist in the task of identifying dead or dangling links.
One thing in the course of search engine optimization which seems to have been lost sight of is the fact that you are not fussing with keywords and META tags and ALT attributes and making sure all your neighbors are of the right class; you are optimizing your web pages so that more people will find what they are looking for by visiting your site. Increasing your page rank is just ONE way of accomplishing that goal. You also need to make sure your content works for the human reader. You need to have accurate, well-written pages that draw and hold the interest of the reader. They need to be on subject and informative.
So, do the technical things to make sure that you are perceived by a robotic crawler, but don’t forget that the robots are not the ones buying your product or service, people are.
