What is bad neighborhood
Bad neighborhood means that there are one or more links on a page that target a site that is banned from search engines. And that, because of its content, will never have a PageRank (PR) that exceeds 0 or that offers services that do not comply with the legislation of some countries. Web crawlers detect a link with a page that does not comply with the policy of the search engines and also punish the site that links to such pages. Here are some pointers on what a bad neighborhood is and how to consider it in your SEO strategy.
How it works
There are two main ways that can place the website in a bad neighborhood: a bad link points to the website or a website with many bad links points to the website.The link is “bad” if one of the web pages violates the rules of search engines like Google or Bing. In detail, techniques such as cloaking, link farming, paid linking, keyword stuffing or spamming are indicators for one or more transgressions of the rules. A hacked website can also be responsible for the bad ranking of the associated web pages by Google.
What to do
As soon as there is a risk of Bad Neighborhood, webmasters can immediately remove outgoing “harmful” links on their own pages. For incoming links, engines may force the sites concerned to remove the links. Alternatively, it is also possible to devalue backlinks via Google Webmaster Tools. If the own project has already exited from the index of Google or other search engines due to Bad Neighborhood, there is at least the possibility to start a Reconsideration Request at Google. Afterwards, Google examines the affected page and, in the positive case, re-index it.
Help Google out
Google manually examines your own page and reinstates it if the result is positive. From this we can conclude that reputable pages are always recognizable by high-quality link sources as well as individual link texts. For search engine optimization it is also important to trust in the experience in dealing with foreign websites. Most of the time, a gut feeling is enough to unmask a dubious page.
When learning what a bad neighborhood is, remember: search engines do not like it when websites let themselves be linked by other websites by means of purchased links or via dubious link exchange systems.