It happens that a website owner is totally perplexed at the poor performance of his website. He has SEO‘d the website with good content, the right keywords and lots and lots of links. So it is rather baffling when the website does not rank well in the search engines. This is when a professional optimiser gets a wry smile; he has seen it all before. There are many reasons why a website that should be all reckoning of he owner do well, but is not. The most common reasons for this is the immaturity of the website with not enough time to rank high.

Optimisation is another one; yes it is possible to overdo things. The third common reason is that you simply did not choose your friends and neighbours very wisely. In professional terms this means that the online relations you have built is inappropriate for a reason.

If your website is too young, you will simply have to show patience for it to mature. If you have over optimized, it is easy to tone things down. If you chose your neighbours badly, there is only one thing to do. Get rid of them very fast and restore a good ranking.

Avoid links to bad neighbourhoods

Links are essential for good ranking and good inbound natural links is what you are after. The norm is for you to have as large a number of inbound links as you can build. Linking can also turn into a minefield. The search engines take an extremely dim view of unethical practices. Basically they will not tolerate it and anyone involved with unethical manipulations of the search engines will face penalties for trickery.

What does this mean for your website that has a squeaky clean image? If you choose to link to a website considered to be bad news, your website will be seen as being an accessory to crime. Search engines are harsh to make sure that the search results are truthful. It is important to know that you will not be penalised for inbound bad links, they are out of your control. It is the bad outbound links you must be careful of.

Who gets labelled a bad neighbour?

There are many reasons under the umbrella of unethical practices that achieves the bad neighbour label for a website. Illegally trying to boost ranking comes in many guises. Keyword stuffing, no original content or duplicate content, copyright violations will get a site labelled. Deceiving website titles, using hidden text and links and multiple machine created pages as well as doorway pages all fall under the deceit umbrella.

Good or bad, how do you know?

It is not possible to know the endless list of banned websites off by hand. The simplest way to find out if a link is a good or a bad guy is to see if the website is indexed by Google. In the search bar type – site:[site name].com and if there are no results, it means bad news. An excellent tool to help in identification is http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/ This helps if you have a large amount of links to investigate. Then get rid of the bad neighbours immediately.

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