site has links from bad neighbourhoods

[PI Guy]

A site has links from bad sites. The links were not added by the owners or anyone associated with them.

It seems that competitors have been trying to sabotage the sites rankings.

What can be done to fix it?

 

[terryuk]

Bing have a disavow links option (http://www.bing.com/community/site_...2012/06/27/disavow-links-you-don-t-trust.aspx)

However Google are a bit slow on the mark with that one - 6 months sluggish, you would have thought it'd be the other way around.

Is it recent? effecting the rankings as of yet?

 

[aidan1980]

first thing to do is try and contact the owners of the bad sites and request the links are removed

 

[WhiteRoseSEO]

Is it affecting the rankings? Although links from bad neighbourhoods are clearly a bad idea, they tend to have no impact on ranking, rather than having a negative effect. Google tends to give little notice to poor links in order to prevent sabotage of competitor's sites.

 

[frida_adams]

first thing to do is try and contact the owners of the bad sites and request the links are removed

+1....... This is the only thing you can do.

 

[logicaljackSEO]

How have you identified these sites as 'bad sites'? If having the links up is going to harm your ranking long-term then you need to look at contacting the blog/site owner and getting them taken down. If that does fail then you can contact their web host as they may be able to help you getting it removed.

 

[PI Guy]

they are porn sites

 

[Dark-Kni]

porn sites are bad sites?? really?? :|

 

[astutiumRob]

porn sites are bad sites?? really?? :|

Yup, a lot of them are really poorly coded - full of html errors

 

[webgeek]

they are porn sites

There's nothing inherently wrong with adult site links. If you are linking OUT to them, it's another story entirely.

Check the sites. Are they indexed? Do they have PageRank?

If the answer to both these is yes, then more than likely they are helping you not hurting you.

Sites which were caught up as being sources of "bad links", like blog networks, were de-indexed. Others, which were basically links farm, like some article sites, had their PageRank stripped to 0.

Check the link strength in OSE and Ahrefs.... You may be surprised to find that some of your more powerful IBL's are actually coming from these adult sites.

 

[Steve Sellers]

If google saw porn sites as bad then why would they even show up in SERPs.....

Surely if you own a porn/sex related sites then lots of links from porn sites would be seen as 'relevant' links?

 

[thelegalstop]

Hi, I do not thoroughly understand how do you identify some websites as bad neighbours?

 

[UKSBD]

It's not so much the 1 link that can be a problem, it is the other links around the link and the other content around the link that does.

Many years ago I ran some tests on surrounding links and the *Google Similar Pages* feature (back in the days when similar pages would only show under 20 pages)

I had some test pages set up with 3 links on it like this;

LinktoA - LinktoB - LinktoC

Sites A and C were related to each other but Site B was completely unrelated.

If the test pages were strong enough I could get SiteB showing up in the list when doing a Google *related:* search for Sites A and B.

Basically Google saw site B as similar site A or C for no other reason than the close proximity of links from another site.