Bad neighborhood linking - anyone can share experience how significant it can impact rankings?

[tomypro]

SEOMoz community,

If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board.

While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4)

While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site.

My question two the community are two-fold:

• Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word?

• The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site?

Thanks /Thomas

[RyanKent]

If you link to a "bad" site, then you can definitely be penalized. A link is a "vote" for the site. You are vouching for them. There is clearly discretion involved, but you described your site as "heavily linking" to the penalized site so you are likely to be penalized for that act.

Any penalties can be passed along to a new site. Don't try to avoid the penalty by changing URLs and 301'ing to a new site.

You really need to view Google as a highly intelligent, highly experienced organization. Penalties are supposed to be very painful. The headache you are experiencing is supposed to convince you and others to ensure this issue never happens again. It's like "scared straight" is for people and the legal system.

[irvingw]

It is absolutely possible, Google is very smart.

a) Remove your external links to any penalized sites.

b) If you have links from penalized sites pointing to internal pages on your site, let those pages 404 and make new URLs for them. If you have bad links pointing to your homepage that is much more time consuming because you'll need to reach out to all the webmasters and have them remove any bad links pointing to your homepage.

c) Submit reconsideration requests in webmaster tools, explain exactly what happened and what steps you're taking to remedy the situation. Include something new that you did in each letter so they see the progress you are making. Good luck! Don't buy or sell links!

[RyanKent]

I agree with you completely on items "a" and "c", but I disagree on item "b".

There are some pages such as your home page for which you cannot easily change the URL. Even if you could change the URL, you would create a 301 from the old page to the new page which would cause the bad external link to your site to follow to the new page along with your backlinks.

You simply cannot be penalized for the bad link to your site unless Google has reason to believe you paid for that link. If your site could be penalized for a bad site linking to you, then competitors would simply create "bad' sites and link to your site. There is simply nothing you can do about it.

[tomypro]

Thank you for the responses guys, it is very aligned with our plan.

Additional question that fits the context, are there any good "penalty checker" tools out there that would allow an easy way to pass by urls and it gives feedback if a site has likely received a penalty?

From our understanding, a serious penalty results in

• loss of page rank
• site being completely deindexed from Google

Are there any other signals?

Thanks /Thomas

[mickey11]

You could surely be penalized. If you really must link to them for some reason use nofollow at least