The effect of bad outgoing links

November 20th, 2006

A Google official has recently commented on bad neighborhood links and how they affect your web site rankings on Google.

It seems that Google doesn’t like the following types of web sites:

- free for all links pages (FFA) - link farms (automated linking schemes with lots of unrelated links) - known web spammers In a discussion in a webmaster forum, Google’s Adam Lasnik has recently clarified what Google looks for in regards to bad neighborhood penalties:

1. There is no relation between outbound links and Google’s supplemental index.

“It’s unlikely that your outbound linking is causing your pages to be listed in the supplemental, rather than main index.”

2. Google looks for bad neighborhood linking patterns

“Also, be assured that we’re not looking to penalize folks for a ‘bad’ link here and there. Rather, our algorithms are tuned to look for patterns of ‘egregious’ linking behavior… both on individual sites and in the aggregate.”

3. You should check the links on your web site

“It’s certainly in your users’ interest that you regularly audit outgoing links on your site (especially prominent ones) to ensure that you’re not losing folks’ trust by sending them to inappropriate places or 404 pages. Sure, it’s great to keep Google happy, but it’s usually more important (long term) to have your users be return visitors.”

Also many links to 404 error pages might cause ranking problems. For that reason, it’s a good idea to check the links on your web site every now and then. So always check your pages are linking to relevant, working sites, and if they arent, use robots.txt or meta tags to stop Google following those links.