Will Incoming Links From Bad Neighborhoods Get You banned?

Link Building Misconception 2: Incoming Links From “Bad Neighborhoods” Will Get You Penalized or Banned…

This is another very common myth and is probably also the most illogical.

The worst cases I see of this one are when you hear / read / see webmasters spending even the most minuscule amount of effort to try and get another webmaster to remove an incoming link from the respective webmasters website.

There is no way that links from a bad neighborhood will get you banned and I guess I need to explain what I mean by “bad neighborhoods”.

This is a common term for a lot of black hat / grey hat search engine marketers that use cloaked domains, have massive networks of in house websites, maintain splogs, and can also be classed as links from adult, pharmacy, gambling related websites and so forth.

Generally just “bad neighborhoods” that you wouldn’t actively look for links in anyway.

This myth simply defies all logic.

If someone could “negatively manipulate” their own (or more importantly here – anyone else’s) website rankings by throwing a truck load of incoming links at their websites from “bad neighborhoods” then everyone would be doing it.

Imagine if I could knock off the top 10, 20, or 30 websites ranking for a specific keyword phrase I wanted to target – simply by running a software application and throwing thousands of spam type links at it.

If that were the case, that you could “negatively manipulate” other webmasters rankings, every competitive search engine optimizer and his dog would be doing it.

It just doesn’t work that way.

(FYI – a popular software application that could do this very easily is called “Xrummer” and is used extensively in the Black Hat SEO world. You can find it online easily enough if you want to read more about it. I don’t recommend using such software however. It’s not inline with my principals of building a solid incoming linking foundation for long term success and the links it can obtain hold little real value SEO wise.)

Further to the point, if this was the case, search engine results would be much easier to manipulate in this fashion than they currently are – by building a solid foundation of sensible incoming links to positively improve one’s own search engine rankings.

So where does this misconception come from?

Generally from those webmasters that have seen negative impacts of doing other “questionable” things to “game” the search engines (search engine cloaking, keyword stuffing, and so forth), who then attribute the effect of a penalty to the wrong cause.

The worse case scenario here is that incoming links from such websites hold little to no value in terms of improving ones own search engine rankings.

So the null effect ultimately makes this myth a null point.

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