Sharing a server or IP block with sites penalized for using dubious SEO tactics, such as hidden text or link farms or linking to or from poor quality sites with a lot of spam content is known as Bad Neighborhood.
There are particular sites that are banned on Search Engines for particular reasons. Usually, websites are blacklisted because they try to increase their ranking by using illegal techniques such as keyword stuffing, duplicate content, hidden text and links, doorway pages, deceptive titles, machine-generated pages, copyright violators, etc. Search engines also tend to dislike meaningless link directories that conceive the impression that they have a fat links section on your site. Similarly, websites and pages which are Free-For-All, commonly known as FFA are also considered poor quality sites by the Search Engines.
Sometimes a website is perfectly organized with the right number of keywords without overstuffing and every page is linked to the other in a proper way but still it cannot get better ranking in SEO. The reason could be due to the over optimizing and bad neighborhood effects (inappropriate online relations) detected by the search engines. It is just like if you, by mistake, have exchanged links with bad neighbors, then you will also be considered bad. To avoid this situation, either fix over optimization on the website pages, and if it doesn’t work, then simply break away from bad neighborhood websites.
Bad Neighborhood links that Google doesn’t like are of three types:
- Free For All links pages (FFA)
- Link Farms (automated linking schemes with lots of unrelated links)
- Known web spammers like adult and gambling sites
Linking to sites that are not liked by Google can result in your website being listed in the supplemental index instead of on the main index. Google looks out for linking patterns, but if you audit outgoing links on your site regularly to make sure that you’re not losing trust by sending them to inappropriate places or 404 pages, you can gain trust in the eyes of Google.
To check whether a site is black listed or not, the simplest way is to run a “site:” command on Google for that website. If no pages come up, it is most probable that the website is under some sort of penalty. Simply stay away and remove outbound links to any banned or new sites from your website pages. Another simpler option is to check with the Bad Neighborhood tool at www.bad-neighborhood.com as it gives links to and from suspicious sites.
So keep checking your pages on a regular basis because if your links are healthy so will your rankings!