What is a Bad Neighborhood Checker?

There are certain website that are involved in spamming or other undesirable practices that make linking to them unsuitable and could result in having your site penalized by the search engines. The Bad Neighborhood Check Tool will alert you to any sites that may be in industries that have been known historically to employ search engine spamming such as adult, online gambling, and pharmaceutical industries. The tool examines anchor text to flag such words as “sex”, “adult” and “pharma” among others.

Enter the URL to check about your SEO neighborhood grade

Neighborhood Check Tool Features

The tool is not intended to dictate who you should or should not link to, but instead is only a helpful alerting device so you can examine the site further and make a determining decision from there. In addition to examining anchor text, the tool also looks for such things as a disproportionate number of links from blogs that may indicate a company involved in comment spamming. Since blogs tend to link primarily to other blogs, it likely wouldn’t be a problem in this case. However, if the website is a product related site, it could be engaging in negative practices that the search engines will frown upon. Human decision is always required.

A preview on how results from neighborhood checks will look

Another feature of the tool is that the results include the number of links on a page that can exceed Google’s recommended number. Pages with excessive links may indicate that the site could be a link farm or has been heavily spammed. This is a very useful tool for any webmaster or SEO.