"bad neighbourhood" just a myth?

[Brian911]

Well, I want to discuss the whole "linking to banned sites results in google penalties" theory (bad neighbourhood theory).

About a year ago I bookmarked a page that linked to a site on a recently banned domain; I started monitoring its position in the SERPS for the targetted keywords. One year later I can say that the site wasn't penalized at all but still resides on #1, just as it did last year.

Do you have any experience with it or did you just believe the horror stories spread around and didn't bother to try?

[Papadoc]

There are lots of potential scenarios that can exist and have the bad neighborhood penalty still make sense:

1) The link simply didn't get cross-indexed.
2) What you defined as a bad neighborhood didn't get picked up as such.
3) There were enough good incoming links to overcome the one negative
4) There were enough links to good sites that this one is considered an anomoly. This vs. those who make a practice out of it.
5) The page had a no-index tag on it
6) The robots file excluded the link page

Either 5 or 6 would mean that G never even saw it, but that it was put there for human eyes to get their link back.

There are others that are a little more technical as well. Plus the fact that we don't know how this all fits into Google's algorithm. There are enough good link opportunities out there, why screw around with the dark side and risk getting burned?

For myself, if I've spotted a site that I think would otherwise be okay to link to and he's linking to junk, I am most certainly not going to link to it. To me, it's just not worth the risk and I don't have the time to go back and make sure that he's playing straight and has no penalties that will then bleed to me. In those cases, they've traded a good unreciprocated link for a high risk reciprocated one.

[awall19]

I think its more about the ratio of good links to bad links. the Yahoo! directory links to linkstoyou.com, which is the classic example of what a link farm is...lots of good sites end up linking to lots of bad sites (especially as sites change or go away and new porn type sites are set up)...think about forums, archived content on blogs and news sites, directories, etc.

also I think if your site is rather powerful you can get away with linking into more garbage or a higher % of garbage.

[longcall911]

I wouldn't think that *one* link to a banned domain would be much of an issue. After all, domains are abandoned and picked up by black-hats everyday. As others here have stated, if there were a sufficient number of bad neighbor links (whatever that number might be) I suspect it would eventually effect SERPs.

[ferret77]

Originally Posted by longcall911

=and picked up by black-hats everyday.

pictures a cloven of black cloaked seos sitting around picking up domains, in between creating bad neighborhoods