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Sphinn Home » SEO
Linking to bad neighborhoods can KILL your SEO efforts
SEO News Source: http://www.huomah.com
Published: May 14, 2009 - 09:21 am
Story Found By: theGypsy 1005 Days ago
Category: SEO
(SNIP)The issue of bad neighbourhoods has been a frequent topic of discussions among SEOs for a very long time. It is widely considered that it is one of the ranking factors that can have substantial negative effect on your site. Google itself talks about bad neighbourhoods suggesting to avoid linking to them. - we look at 3 free tools to keep your site safe!!
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from TCotton 1003 Days ago #
Votes: 0

It’s all speculation and no proof though isn’t it.It is such an obvious aspect of hosting and something that Google would be entirely aware of - shared hosting means sharing an IP address... penalise one website for spamming and then penalised hundreds if not thousands of others at the same time? I doubt it.

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from MajesticSEO 1003 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Hey, thanks to everyone for sphinns and to David for giving us the opportunity to write about this subject! @TCotton: from our point of view it is a question of risk - hosting is a very competitive industry and it actually makes sense to move your site regularly anyway (deals only get better), so if you see some bad domains on your IP then why take risk? It’s just not worth it - choice of hosting is one of a few things under your control so it makes sense to make a good choice. Here is the bit that did not make into the story - our project site was banned by Google (completely removed from index) in January this year: it turned out that shared hosting we were using at the time (majesticseo.com site used dedicated IP and totally separate hosting already) on was hacked and invisible cloaked links were put on our front page, we could not see them as they were cloaked but Google did, so they auto banned us - luckily we got reincluded pretty quickly but after this lesson was learnt - we moved hosting. So if you see bad neighbours that appears to have been hacked (like one of the sites in our story) it means shared hosting might no be as secure as you think and this CAN KILL your site rankings dead. The risk is just not worth taking.

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from theGypsy 1003 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Hiya Cotton... proof? he he... methinks we could ask that of a LOT of posts in the SEO space. Now, we do have some anecdotal evidence in the form of a post mentioned in the comments... and I can certainly show that the search engineers at Google are actually concerned about such things with a recent patent awarded on Host Level Spam Detection - http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Algorithm-Matters/Host-level-spam-detection.htmlFurther more we do know that linking out to bad neighbourhoods is a risk... Thus I submit to you that it is certainly something for SEOs to consider - I wouldn’t get crazy anal about it... but it is something to be aware of IMHO...@Alex... was my pleasure talking about this the last few weeks and eventually having you come by to talk more about it. Feel free to come back any time!!

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from CrazyJoker 998 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Thanks,that a great info for a newbie like me.

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