For whatever reason, I can never post to the Google Webmaster Help group, because I always get the dreaded An error was encountered while trying to post, please try again later. error. So I'll relate here what I'd LIKE to be able to post there, and perhaps someone will relay my message for me.
In this thread, Adam Lasnik is asking for some general questions that they can answer. I have a question, which I'll post here, and hopefully it will be relayed to the group. Whether or not they choose it to answer is another story, but I'd at least like to submit the question as a possibility.
My question is:
We know that we should avoid linking to "bad neighborhoods", and while it may be impossible to know "for sure" what a bad neighborhood is, we can judge for ourselves fairly well. However, let's say I linked to a legit site 2 years ago, and have since linked to hundreds more sites since then (in various blog posts for example). There's a strong chance I don't even REMEMBER who I linked to two years ago in some post. Now let's say Google penalizes or bans that site now for something he has recently done. Am I going to be punished because I linked to that site long, long ago? Keep in mind that I probably don't even remember linking to it. I probably don't know that it has recently been penalized because I certainly can't track every site I've ever linked to. So...will the fact that I am now, unbeknown to me, linking to a "bad neighborhood", affect my site? Will I be punished?
So, Adam, if you could kindly add that to the list of questions that people would like to see you answer, I would appreciate it. And if any of my readers here would like to pass that question along to that groups thread for me, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks!
Submitted. BTW, I *love* your comment form enhancements. 🙂
Thanks, Sebastian! And yes, hehe, some wise person prompted me to enhance the comment form. 😉
It would make things a lot easier for webmasters to monitor this if Google webmaster tools provided a list of your outbound links as well as internal and external inbound links.
Reuben raises a desirable point with the Webmaster Tools. It’d be interesting to see a) the answer, and b) any long term effects damage data published.
I don’t often visit Google Groups, but I will have to follow this thread.
I would expect (if there is an answer) that its going to be a statistical thing – ie if you link out, over time, to 1,000 sites, of which:
* 200 are high quality,
* 5 turn bad *after you link* (and remember that Google has the history of each site waaaay better than the wayback machine, so they know it changed after you linked) and
* the remaining 795 are average –
then I don’t think the 5 bad neighbourhood links would count against you enough to matter. Their ‘badness’ would be outweighed by the ‘goodness’ of the other links.
I can’t believe I phrased it like that… 😉
(Had to post and see what this comment cleverness is ;))
Sounds reasonable, Lea, although I’m not sure how reasonable a google bot always is. 🙂 The cleverness, in case you didn’t pick up on it, is the lengthening of the comment form fields, which Sebastian ranted on about in his latest post.
Hi
I read your question and one way is there that you should go to google itself and consult related to it through email and as i know, Google definitely will give you response through email.
Bye
Which alternate reality do you live in?