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The number of links to your site will affect your page rank and search engine rankings. But, in the words of Google, “avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links”. How can you be certain that you have not allowed any bad links from your site? It is now much easier to find out with an excellent free link checking tool called the Bad Neighborhood checker.

Thousands of links from overcrowded directory pages in niches unrelated to your site will not benefit your page rank - of course I was aware of that and I am quite careful about the places where I seek backlinks now. The Bad Neighborhood tool will quickly scan the outbound links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and alert you to possible problem areas.

I used this on my own site and there were a few questionable links lurking in my outbound links, which I would not have discovered without using the tool.

You get a lot of useful information from the link checker: link density is highlighted using the red, green amber traffic light system. Green means the site meets Google’s Webmaster guidelines of 100 links or less. Then there is a tick to indicate that the page checks ‘clean’ - i.e. there are no links to adult or other questionable sites. If a link is not ticked then it can show as a ‘redirect’ - not always suspicious as the tinyurls will flag in this way. But you might want to check other redirect links that show up. If the link page no loner exists the ‘404 not found’ cross will show, and finally if the link includes links where the anchor text contains bad language you will see the ‘Bad Neighborhood’ alert.

My suspicious links had arrived on my site because I hosted a few ‘Blog Carnival’ editions. The blog owners who submitted stories to me had some very questionable outbound links from their own sites, to adult and gambling sites. These were ‘nofollow’ links but they would still penalise me so I have now removed the links and I am not hosting any more blogging carnivals.

Another site that had sent me some bad outbound links was wholinkstome.com. Because any website owner can enter their URL on the site and the latest additions are listed together, my URL was next to all sorts of gambling and adult pages.

All this showed me that care is needed when choosing where to exchange links for your website or blog, and the online link exchange sites are out as most member sites are simply spam sites that could get your own site banned if you link to them.