In a recent post I gave you a basic introduction to Google Page Rank, and how it works. Today we’ll examine the PR penalty system more closely with regards to what sites you link to, more specifically talking about one tool that I discovered through a recent post on SEOLand.

Google Page Rank is a very clever creature, it works on numerous algorithms that Google are happy to tell you about - provided you sign a contract agreeing to your instant death thereafter. A proposition that many webmasters tearing their hair out have probably considered quite seriously.
Page rank has the ability to make or break a site, good PR and it can give your indexed pages that extra bump they need to get into the top 5, and the maximum click through rate, while having poor PR can ensure that your competitors overtake you that bit more easily, and bump you down to page two; where the number of click throughs you’re likely to get is akin to the number of bikini clad supermodels you’re likely to get at the north pole.
That said however, PR is not the be all and end all of SEO, there is absolutely no point in focusing all your efforts on link building and PR campaigns if your meta content has not been optimised, or your site lacks decent content. Like anything else in the SEO world.. its just another one of the many bricks you need to lay to build your website big and strong.

From the previous article, we’ve established the basics of how page rank works, and as such I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions about how you can improve your page rank. Today, we look at how to avoid the penalties that we looked at in the last article too.

As mentioned, your PR is affected negatively if you are linking to sites of poor quality. This is not the only thing that it is affected by, but when it comes to PR penalties this is the most prominent cause.

The problem comes if you have a relatively big website, perhaps even a link directory - it becomes difficult to keep track of, and remember all the sites you link to, and check them on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are still of high quality and they haven’t slipped at all. Of course, there are dedicated content management systems that will take care of all your links and scan for reciprocal links back to you, page rank, and various other elements.. but these dedicated software solutions cost top dollar, and aren’t a generally suitable solution for the average webmaster.

Thankfully, there is a free alternative, which I discovered through SEOLand - ‘what is this free madness you speak of?!’ i hear you cry.

Read on.

The Bad-Neighborhood tool is a stunning little web application developed to solve the problem of keeping track of your outbound links. Essentially what the tool does, is scan your site for outbound links, then, when it finds them, it scans all those sites for dubious content, further outbound links, blatant spam, and keyword stuffing.

If it finds any of the elements listed above, it alerts you to where they are located, and where the link to that page is located. This way you can not only tell if you’re linking to poor quality sites, you can also tell if the sites you are linking to are linking to poor quality sites.

The results look like this

As you can see I’ve linked to flickr for one of my images (under the creative commons license) and because that page has a high density of hyperlinks in the page copy it has been marked as blog spam. You have to bare in mind that this tool uses relatively simple programming for analysing these pages, so of course it will sometimes flag up things as spam that aren’t. Use your common sense and you’ll be fine.

I find this tool an absolute joy to use, if you notice a drop in PR (in my experience) 9 times out of 10 it has something to do with one of the sites you link to, and this little tool highlights problems quickly and easily.

It should be noted however that while the tool produces good results, it does not go very deep into the site, so you may want to run the scan on you root domain, your blog, and large subcategories, etc.

Have you got a better tool? What do you think of this one?

Drop me a line in the comments!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 12:19pm and is filed under Google, Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.