Are you linked to a bad neighborhood?
You probably already know that inbound links to your site are good, and a quality inbound link from a topic-related site can bring great quality traffic and even help your search engine rankings. What you might not have known though, is that linking out to other quality sites within your subject can also help your rankings.
In most cases, one site can’t answer all the questions a user may have, and helping them out by linking to other sites with useful information is providing a great service to the end user. The search engines recognize this, and like it when you link out to another authority level site.
You can’t always control who links to you but you can control who you link to. And you’d better be careful not to link out to a bad neighborhood, because this you can control and you will be penalized if you choose to link to a bad site.
So how do you know what’s a good site to link out to and what’s not? Guess what, there’s a tool for that! And it’s free. Check out the Bad Neighborhood Link Checker. Before you provide a link out to your site users, take a moment to check it out and make sure there are no warnings. This tool will tell you if a link checks out or if there are questionable items found on that page. The tool is meant to provide guidance and point out potential issues that you should give a further look before deciding if it’s a good link or not.
As always, if you run into anything that doesn’t make sense, Upright Communications is here to provide expert ethical advice on SEO and link building strategies.
