Posts Tagged ‘SEARCH ENGINE’
How To Avoid The Bad Neighborhood Blues
I can only suspect that you have managed to find your way to this site because your interest falls into either or both of the following two categories:
a) You are a social blogger looking for popularity and/or fame; or
b) You are a webmaster looking to brush-up on or advance your backlink skills for the sole purpose of successful internet marketing.
Now as most of you may or may not know, the term “SEO” is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. And it is no secret that gaining backlinks is the primary means upon which to get your website or blog positioned well in the search engines… But I’m going to jump a little bit ahead of the game here to help eliminate a potential and inevitable problem that you may face in your backlink building conquest; especially if you are new to the game.
As with any internet marketing technique, there are certain risks attributable to having other sites linking to your site. This is because any given site could ultimately turn out to be a bad reference or otherwise have less than a reputable character with the search engines because they have been associated with SPAM; thereby imputing that status to your site. Although there are some reputable resources out there that teach you skills on how to build effective backlinks — sites I will respectfully endorse a bit further on in this site — for now I find it very critical to focus on a subject that most of these sources simply glean over and/or fail to mention altogether. That subject is known as “Co-Citation”.
Now just like anything else there is both bad and good co-citation, especially when it comes to backlinks. Although the term “co-citation” is rarely used by seasoned webmasters or internet marketers, the term that most webmasters are familiar with when it comes to link building is “Bad Neighborhood”. Both terms essentially have the same meaning, so distinguishing between the two is mere semantics because the term “bad neighborhood” is simply a case of co-citation. Needless to say, at all cost you want to avoid being associated with sites that have been branded as a bad neighborhood! To achieve this it is imperative that you understand how your site might become associated with a bad neighborhood through co citation.
What is Co-Citation?
Co-Citation is a popular similarity measure used to establish a subject similarity between two or more items, in this case we’re referring to backlinks. The following illustration provides an example.
The upper four sites A, B, C and D all link to the other sites 1, 2, 3 and 4, but A, B, C and D do not backlink to each other. However, despite the fact that sites A, B, C and D do not link to each other, search engines imply that sites A, B, C and D are related to each other because sites 1, 2, 3 and 4 link to them. In other words, if your website is “1″, because your site is linked to from A, and A links to sites 2, 3 and 4 your site is considered to be associated in the same neighborhood as sites 2, 3 and 4. Likewise, the relationship of site B linking to sites 2, 3 and 4; or site C linking sites 2, 3 and 4; or site D linking to sites 2, 3 and 4 — all create and form the same co-citation association to your site. If any of sites A, B, C, D or 2, 3 or 4 are associated in a bad neighborhood these backlinks could could substantially jeopardize the trust-rank of your site in the eyes of the search engines.
Therefore, when you are getting backlinks to your site, the most critical element is not only who you link to or receive a link from, but also who is linked on these same sites with you! It does not matter if you are not directly linked to sites that are considered bad, the fact that you are on the same site pages with bad sites means that your site is now linked from a bad neighborhood, which could substantially hinder your sites ranking and trust in the search engines. Granted, having a lot of backlinks to your site is good SEO, but being conservative and cautious as to which sites you link with could save you from potential problems in the long run.
