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.
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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.
Ouch. My main site was pointed out as blog spam.
I will have to look into this. There are hundreds of links to it, but very few of them are blog comments by me.
@Eskil – it is normal for blogs to get most of their links from other blogs. Currently BN doesn’t detect if a site being scanned is a blog, so it flags it as “potential blog spam” if it fits that pattern, but hopefully soon I will be re-coding it to try and not flag actual blogs with that classification.
Thanks for the useful tool. I even included it in my article. Found it very helpful.
my blog just get penalty from google. Can anyone please check whats wrong? please thanks.. i really don’t know what to do anymore
I have a question on how to find these “questionable” links shown for a site. I go to the url it says has the questionable link, or the links to the questionable sites, but I can’t find them anywhere. I’d like to get rid of some of the links that I’ve found with the ttool that are definitely inappropriate, but am having trouble locating them on my site. Is there something I’m missing here??
Thanks for providing this tool! And help anyone can provide on using it…
Alice, that could differ on a case by case basis. It depends on your site, and where the tool said the bad links were. Hit me up using the email link at the bottom of Bad Neighborhood if you really can’t find them, and let me know what it is that you are seeing.
Could you clarify the Google rules on Bad Neighbors. I think that my Gmail account and my conversation between potential partners lead to my removal from Google search- do you think this is possible?
Also, is there a number of bad links that would lead to a Google censorship? I’m just curious your advice for how to walk the line between getting the benefits of links without censorship.
Finally, it appears that many sites that look ‘bad’ based on BN criteria actually have high Alexa and/or Google rankings… any help?
Thanks!
Mark Montoya
A very handy tool, but I’ve found living in esSEX, a lot of my pages come up as questionable!
Cheers
Rob
I ran the test and the “AddThis” button which links you to all the social networking sites and is pretty handy comes up as linked to many bad sites. Any suggestions on if I should delete this from our websites?
I’m quite upset that you decided my site was a “bad neighborhood.” I think you are causing much trouble and headaches for people who do not deserve it.
Just what decent people need, to be branded a bad place to link.
@Janet – no, I would not delete the AddThis button.
@Vivian – I get a strong feeling that you completely ignored the contents of this post before deciding to comment. It is for people such as yourself who do not understand the Bad Neighborhood tool that this post was written. Please take the time to read it. Thank you.
yes this was a good read BUT my feeling on bad neighborhood links are that 2.0 Internet is changing so fast that your ideas and theories will be disregarded in 1 year from now. the internet2.0 has the ability to Chang over night.
what that sad i do agree with you on bad neighborhood. i also thing that spam some day we become an source of artificial intelligences. lol
Thanks for sharing such optional information but some of my sites was declined as bad naighborhood by your tool. It’s not bad but almost all my site are ideally for Google. It’ even funny
Really helpfull tool, especially for a beginner like me!
thx a lot!
This was an amazing find – although some of our pages are flagged by your code we’re not worried as the explanation you provide about how this tool works is really helpful. We are still a young company, learning seo as we go – we make page 1 of the big G on about 25% of our key words and phrases so we are getting better at targeting our work. We’ll be back to make sure none of the of spam gets past us. Thank you BN.
Jon
Very nice tool. I used it check several sites that had left comments related to dentistry on my blog that were non-dentistry related sites. I was surprised to find most that I had accepted were legit with about 1,000 links and either “0″ or “1″ bad link. So it reinforced my judgement that I had deleted the bad sites and left the good sites as links. One exception, was a blog site that discussed the effects of various drugs complete with chemical formulas–it had only 22 links of which 4 were considered bad. However, I left the link because the content was not related to any the pharma or adult type links. It was a judgement call which I think is OK.