Oh No! Am I in Bad Blog Neighborhood?

Bloggers live in virtual world and face situations or problems just like people face in the real world. We live in a neighborhood, some are good neighbors and some are bad. But if you are living in an area which is notorious for any reason or where all neighbors are known for their bad behavior, you will also considered as bad guy. It’s very simple and logical. (Birds of a feather flock together as Mama always said.)

Now put yourself in the shoes of person who is good but living in nitrous area or they have bad neighbors. In both situations he will be penalized. But why we are discussing good neighbors and bad neighbors in a blog post?  Because, a blog is also a neighborhood of sorts. Both good and bad blogs exsist.

Blogs have generally two types of bad neighborhoods. One in which he is living and second one to which he has linked his blog site too.

Living in Bad Neighborhoods:-

Most of the blogs who are in their initial or intermediary phase use shared hosting services for hosting. Such servers share the same IP for all sites hosted on it. Now if one of these other sites is performing a suspicious SEO technique that site will get banned and there is a good chance that your site will also get banned due to same shared IP address. Do a little investment and purchase a dedicated IP for your website. A dedicated IP would not only give you peace of mind but it also speeds up your site as a shared IP bears more load. This is another reason why web hosting service providers offer dedicated IP address as a separate product. Check how many and which sites are hosted on Same IP as yours.

Linking to Bad Neighborhoods:-

This is very common type of bad neighborhood. Google bans web sites due to black hat SEO practices like copyright infringement, link farming, hidden links, deceptive titles etc. All of these techniques are known as black hat SEO used to illegitimately optimize page rank. Such sites, when caught, are banned by Google forever.

How to Avoid:-

After discussing the bad neighborhood concept, one thing is clear and that is don’t link to such sites. But how do you know which sites are marked as bad neighborhoods or banned by Google. It’s very simple. Just type site:abc.com in Google search bar and see the results. If Google is not showing the results, it’s most likely that Google has banned that site. Google has removed all indexed and cached files of the site to penalize him.

Before linking to a site, just check the site by adopting the above described method. Links to all sites which are banned or blocked will cost you reduced Page Rank because Google consider you as the part of same bad neighborhood.

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