Internet Marketing Glossary

Definition: Link Neighborhood

A link neighborhood refers to a set of websites that search engines believe are related (and therefore likely to be similar in various ways) because of their pattern of interlinking. Every website is "located" in a link neighborhood by virtue of the sites to which it links and which link to it. If you link to a website in a "bad" link neighborhood, you are telling the search engines that you might also belong in that neighborhood, and that will affect your rankings. (Interestingly, it also seems to be true that linking to reputable websites tends to have a positive rankings effect.)

Your link neighborhood is not defined only by the websites within one link of your website (in other words, your link neighborhood is bigger than just the sites you link to plus the sites that link to you). Websites that are at greater degrees of separation may also be considered to be in your link neighborhood (although the greater the degree of separation, the less closely you will be tied to them, unless you are participating in some kind of elaborate circular linking system, in which case you will be detected and banned anyway).

For example, let's say you link to AcmeWidgets.com, and AcmeWidgets.com made the mistake of linking to WidgetPorn.com, which has been banned from the search engines for some form of bad behavior. (Without research, you probably wouldn't know about this.) AcmeWidgets.com would suffer the most, facing at least a drop in its search engine rankings and maybe even a ban. But your website would suffer too. As soon as the search engines find your new link to AcmeWidgets.com, your website's link neighborhood score will be recalculated, and it will be lower. When the actual rankings for a particlar keywords are computed, your link neighborhood score will be taken into account by the ranking algorithm and will drop your rankings to some degree. It's guilt by association, so you need to know your associates by doing serious research.

Here's a useful tool for understanding the basic idea of link neighborhoods: the TouchGraph Google Browser. If you enter your website's domain and run the app, it will show you a graph of all the sites which are returned by Google when searching for sites that are related to yours. This is not a set of websites that link to yours, or necessarily even sites to which you link. It is a set of sites that are linked to by sites that also link to yours. This is a big distinction to keep in mind when using this app. Also note that Google only reveals a tiny portion of its true knowledge of your link neighborhood — your true link neighborhood is much bigger than anything TouchGraph is able to reveal, because Google cannot be relied upon to provide much information. (ClickScience uses proprietary algorithms to analyze your link neighborhood, working on large datasets that are created through many hours of investigating and crosschecking multiple sources of information. TouchGraph is most useful as an illustrative aid.)

If you examine the graph you just made, you'll see that your website is not necessarily connected to all the other websites that appear. (Keep in mind that a connection on this graph does not mean there are any links between the connected sites — these are related sites. If your website is very new, you may well be connected to all the nodes in the graph, and they might even be your own pages, so check some domains that you know have been around for awhile if you want to get a better sense of how link neighborhoods work.) The websites that appear on your graph that are not connected (i.e., not directly related) to your site are still in your link neighborhood because they are related to sites that are related to yours.

If a website in your link neighborhood is deemed untrustworthy in some way by the search engines, this "mistrust," in the form of diminished TrustRank, will pass to your site, and your search engine rankings will be nudged (or kicked) downward.

The bottom line: if you know your link neighborhood you can save yourself a lot of trouble and improve your search engine rankings.

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