Does your website reside in a bad neighborhood? (Part 3)

 

 

 

So I have explained to you how to remove your website from a “Bad Neighborhood” link but how do you know if you site is linked to a “Bad Neighborhood” or not?  Lucky for us there are a couple of pretty good tools that can help with this. 

One of the tools I highly recommend is called the Text Link Checker Tool and can be found here.  This tool is designed to check your back links and  will tell you if your website is linked to a questionable website.  The FAQ does a very good job of explaining how to read the results and how to determine of your site is linked to a Bad Neighborhood.  

Keep in mind that with this tool it is looking for sites that may or may not be one of the following:

·Adult

·Spam 

·Link Farms

·Directory sites

·A site banned by Google

It is not a full proof tool and does not recommend that you link or do not link to a site. It is just a tool to help you determine whether you should link.  You have to investigate the site for yourself to see whether it is a link you want or not,  

If you need help with getting your link removed please see my other two blogs on this subject.  Part 1 is located here and Part 2 can be found here.

Another good tool that works very well is the Google Toolbar that you download and install.  It becomes apart of your Internet Explorer tool bar.  Once you have this tool installed it is easy to determine what Google thinks about these websites.   Simply browse over to this link and look at the Google Toolbar display in your browser.  Google will show you what the Pagerank of this particular page happens to be at this moment in time.   You are looking for two important factors here.  First you want to see what the Pagerank is for this website.  If it is two or below there may be an issue and Google may see this site as bad.  Visit the site for yourself and use your judgment as whether you want to link to this site.  Determine if the content is relevant to your site.  If it is then it may just be ranking low do to the age of the domain.

If Google has this page grayed out in the tool bar then you have a problem.  Google has done this for a reason.  More than likely Google has banned this site or considers this site to be harmful.  Google may have determined that this site is a Spam site or perhaps they detect a possible virus or hacking issues.  If you copy and paste the URL into a Google Search Bar and it does not show up in the search results then it has been banned from Google.  Either way it is time for you to try or get this link removed.

Please remember that this is not a foolproof tool but it does give you some additional SEO help.