Check Your Blog for Links to Bad Neighborhoods

Organic search traffic is essential for any blog that is hoping to monetize with ad programs like Google Adsense, Text Link Ads, etc. Search Engine Optimization plays an important role in garnering your share of search engine traffic. How a search engine perceives your site is very crucial in this.

In our day to day blogging we link out to several sites. Search engines follow these links (unless you specify rel=nofollow tag) and assumes you give a positive vote to the site you have linked to. Likewise, other sites link to your site as well. Depending on the quality of the site you are linking to or the site linking to you, your search engine ranking can be affected.

So, how do you go about checking for good links and bad links in your blog?

Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker

This excellent tool scans the url you provide and checks for bad links and flags problem areas in your site. After it has scanned all the links in your site, it shows the total number of links, number of unique links and number of questionable links.

Here are a few things this tool shows:

• Link Density: It refers to the number of links in a single page. A high number of links (over 100) in a single page will be looked at as a red flag according to Google Webmaster Guidelines.
• Bad Neighborhood Warning: The tool shows a warning if your blog has an anchor text in a link to a usually spammy industry like sex, gambling or pharmaceutical. This is probably just a false warning. For example, my post titled ‘Check for Sex offenders in your area’ threw a warning flag even though it was a genuine post.
• Blog Spam: If a page you have linked to is in a domain which is appearing as a link from a lot of blogs, it could be indicative of blog comment spamming. My recent link to buymybrokenipod.com was flagged with this. In fact, my links from Blog About Your Blog is flagged as Blog Spam by this tool as I contribute as an author as well as a commentator quite often.
• 404 Not found: A handful of these isn’t usually a problem. To a search engine, a site that returns a lot of 404 errors would means lower trust factor. So, you may need to check the 404 errors in your site and correct the errors.

As you can see, this tool is not 100% fool proof but it can give you a very good overall idea of who you are linking to and how a search engine spider will look at your blog. For eg. my archives page has links to all my previous posts and shows 306 links. I had previously used robots.txt file to stop the bots from spidering this page but I’ll have to recheck if it’s still working.

Also, check out my previous post on Free tools to Check the Health of Your Blog.

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous and incremental process. Tools such as the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker can be a great addition to your toolbox that help with making your blog a little bit more optimized.

I would love to hear about any other tools you use in the pursuit for SEO nirvana! Drop a comment below if you have one.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la – where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable. (RSS)

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