Bad SEO Neighborhood
What Are Bad SEO Neighborhoods?
Any high-performing search engine optimization expert knows the value of relevant and high-quality incoming links. These SEO professionals know that each of these links acts like a “vote in favor” of the content. The more votes (links) the higher the page or post being linked to climbs in search.
To define the number and quality of backlinks to a specific content item is a way for the major search engines to understand the popularity and the audience acceptance and value of the content. After all, if the content is not good why would anyone link to it? If the content is not relevant why would anyone link to it?
As you can see getting links makes a great deal of sense.
However, even though all SEO professionals know the value of high-quality links they also know that acquiring them is extremely difficult. According to data published in 2018, 65% of marketers said that link building is the most difficult SEO tactic. It is.
With the difficulty level so high and the value so great, it can lead to some shady practices. One of the most notorious is to gain links to content from bad SEO neighborhoods. Sites associated with these bad neighborhoods offer easy backlinks (for a price).
You need to understand the bad value of links from these bad SEO neighborhoods. You also need to understand how bad SEO neighborhoods are defined. Learning bad and learning what these neighborhoods are is one of the Google SEO basics to learn.
A set of websites that would be defined as a member of a bad SEO neighborhood includes one or more of the following elements.
Bad Links
These are usually pretty easy to spot because they lead to even seedier parts of the web.
Content Type
In the SEO world, these links are known as bad PPC, which stands for pills, porn, and casinos. If you see any of these, get out of that neighborhood and never work with an SEO that tries to gain position in the search results by acquiring links from these types of sites. Simply put don’t use them (these types of links and the SEO).
Too Many External Links
A site with too many external links. Some websites thrive on internal links to more internal content on the same site. Every other word on a Wikipedia article might link to another article, and that’s fine.
But if a page on a website has too many links to outside sites—especially sites that aren’t directly related to the content the site is about, beware.
An Exception: There can be exceptions and one notable exception would be a site specifically set up to curate content on a particular topic. These sites would be well designed, have an appealing layout, and curate content focused on a topic with the content being highly relevant and high quality. A curation website may have a large number of external links but this type of site is viewed as a benefit to searchers as the site acts as a hub resource for searchers looking for information on that topic.
SPAM Sites
Sometimes, even though there are not too many links or bad links, there are still pages that have a disproportionate amount of spam on their pages.
These usually look like worthless comments or bizarre content that doesn’t seem to provide any value. A seemingly innocent site might be cluttered with spam comments and look fine.
But if nobody is moderating the spam, bad links are bound to come next.
High Ad Content Websites
A website with an overabundance of ads is an indicator of a SPAM website or one which can be defined as associated with a bad neighborhood. Note that if a site runs ads, that doesn’t automatically undermine its credibility. But if it seems like there are more ads than content, be wary.
In fact, Google itself has been cracking down on sites that show more ads than content, oftentimes even banning Google Ad users who don’t follow their guidelines.
Low-Quality Content
If the content on a website is poorly-written then links from this site are not valuable. This item may be harder to spot, and everyone has their own standards for what “good” content is.
But generally, if it’s not content you would feel comfortable linking to from your own site, then you can conclude that links from this site are of low value (or even negative value). Be careful.
Oftentimes really bad content isn’t even written by humans—it’s created with a type of software that “spins” existing content into new articles that look original.
This explains what to look for and how to spot low-quality bad SEO neighborhood websites. Do not work with an SEO company that produces links from these types of websites.
Produce High-Quality Content
Focus your attention on creating high-quality and valuable content for your ideal audience and then using techniques to gain exposure for your content to acquire incoming links.