A Quick Clarification on the Bad Neighborhood Detector
Aug 26th, 2007 by Michael VanDeMar
Due to some misconceptions that I have come across having to do with the Bad Neighborhood Detector tool, I need to clear up a couple of things. Let me say first and foremost that the tool is designed to help webmasters in determining whether or not they might want to link out to a particular website. It was designed to help reduce some of the effort involved with the manual checking process… the tool was not designed to replace the human decision making process in any way, shape, or form.
One of the things that the tool does is to flag any sites that could possibly be in industries that historically have been prone to high incidences of search engine spamming, such as the adult and pharmaceutical fields. Not all sites in those industries are involved with spamming by any means, but even when they aren’t many webmasters like to keep a family friendly experience for their users, and would still prefer not to link to them. To help identify sites of this nature, the tool examines the anchor text linking to the various pages, and checks for parts of certain words within them, such as “adult”, “sex”, and “pharma” (among others).
Just because someone links to a page using the anchor text “Unisex hair styles back in fashion”, “Family Fun For Adults and Children Alike”, or “Problem with drugs? Call our hotline today”, and the tool flags the website because of it, does not mean that you will get penalized for linking to them. The tools is intended to guide you to areas you might want to look at, not to dictate who you do or do not link out to.
There are sites in every industry that are involved in practices that could make them undesirable to link to, which is why the tools does more than just examine anchor text. The tool also does checks such as looking for a disproportionate amount of links from blogs. Since most commercial sites do not naturally attract the majority of their links from blogs, if you are scanning say, a site that sells lighting fixtures, and that has almost all of it’s links coming from blogs, then that site may have gained them from comment spam. If, however, you are scanning Michael Moore’s website, then it is only natural that a large number of bloggers would link to him. Again, human discretion is still needed to interpret the results.
Thank you. 
[...] Bad Neighborhood Clarification [...]
[...] adult, gambling o pharma). Una spiegazione sul funzionamento dell’utility
[...] whether or not you really do wish to link to a particular site.
[...] Bad neighbourhood means that you’re linking to sites that has spam/link related network. Checks for parts of certain words within them, such as
[...] strategies, it is not intended to dictate who you do or do not link out to. Please read more at the Bad Neighborhood Clarification post on the Bad Neighborhood [...]
NOT a “webmaster” but Who is, really ?
The tool was a BIG help for me.
Thank You
Thanks for sharing the tool for bad neighborhood. It is an excellent free tool, but it has limitations of displaying only first 40 results. It would be very nice if you can make a paid membership where the users can access the tool with its full capabilities of displaying all results. I understand bandwidth and time may be a constraint, but you can provide the user with an option of displaying say maximum 500 results.
[...] Important Note: This tool is intended as a guide to assist webmasters in locating potential problem areas with their linking strategies, it is not intended to dictate who you do or do not link out to. Please read more at the Bad Neighborhood Clarification post on the Bad Neighborhood blog. [...]
Thanks for the tool and the clarifications. Active participation is not equal to spamming thus human decision remains important.
Checked your site too before commenting :-))
Really handy tool - thank you! Prod me if you ever need help hosting it! Can you provide a bit more clarification on how something’s flagged as potential blog spam here?
Thanks for the tools , now I using it but gladly no one on my site is a bad backlink.