JLH Design Blog

Your site is judged not only on the content it provides, the sites that link to you, but also the sites you link to. The subject of those links help set the theme of your site but also define your web neighborhood, which in most cases you want to keep good.

We’ve been told in the Webmaster Guidelines to avoid bad neighborhoods.

In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links

If you must link to such a terrible place, then by all means use the comment-spam-paid-link-announcing-bad-neighborhood-no-page-rank-passing nofollow attribute in the links.

In the old days before electricity Google used to announce to the world that a site sucked by gray barring the visible PageRank or simply delisiting the entire site.

When judging a site you used to be able to visit it and check out it’s visible PageRank run a site command and see that it’s indexed and be pretty well assured that the site was doing fine. With the emergence of penalties instead of bans, PageRank not changing, and gray bars showing up for all kinds of pages the job of being a good linker has become more difficult.

With that said, I’ve come up with a short quick list of things that can be done to check if the site is still in good graces with Google. Some of these items are based on pure conjecture by forum members ( the infamous -30 and -950 debaters) so any one failure should not be a clear indication of the sites linkability but may be cause for more investigation.

1. Check for PageRank, if the site is new this may not exist.
2. Check number of pages indexed using the site command.
   1. Compare this number to the URLs in their sitemap if possible.
   2. Crawl the site with Gsitecrawler (which used to have sitelinks but doesn’t now???) to see how many URLs they actually have, compare with indexed.
3. Check the supplemental count. Is it in-line with what you’d expect for the main pages visible PageRank. A PageRank 6 site should be able to hold more than 3 pages in the real index!.
4. Search for the domain name, see if they turn up as the first result.
5. Does the home page show up first in the site command?
6. Most importantly, and often overlooked, if you are linking to site because they are the authority on chickens, search for chickens. Where do they fall in the results?
7. Building on #6 check the ranking for the keywords and combinations of keywords that the site is obviously targeting.
8. Not all bad sites have been caught, yet, so do a good check for compliance with the Webmaster Guidelines. While the site may pass the sniff test on all other fronts, if its got hidden links and text on it, it may be banned tomorrow and you don’t want to be linking to it.
9. Check their link profile using Site Explorer. If 90% of their links are from directories, irrelevant sites, or forum signatures you know you’ve got something suspicious going on.
10. Check the sites basic maintenance quality. A site that has a good robots.txt file, no conical issues, doesn’t use session IDs, etc is probably more aware of search engine standards than one that doesn’t.
11. Check the META tags. Not that this is a sign of being banned, but for me a sign of quality. If the site has 23 META tags from 100 “keywords” to “google-pray” and “revisit-after” you know you are dealing with an amateur that may walk into trouble in the future.
12. Send Matt Cutts an email and ask him to check the site out. He usually get’s back to me in a day or two. Here’s his email address setup just for site health inquiries, in case you don’t have it already:

I’d be interested in hearing what you use to judge a linking partner. If you’ve got a list published include it in the comments, all approved comments go non-nofollowed in 2 weeks!

Updates

JohnMu says, “My main tool for evaluating the value of a site before I link to it is the MSN linkfromdomain:-query. There’s nothing better — even if MSN only has 1/100th of the data that Google (or even Yahoo) has. It would be great to be able to check up on sites like that, eg: [linkfromdomain:othersite.com xxx] or better: [linkfromdomain:othersite.com seo]“