A link neighborhood is the group of websites a site is connected to through links: the sites it links out to and the sites that link to it. The idea is that a site can be judged by the company it keeps. A local bakery linked from its city's newspaper, a food blog and the chamber of commerce sits in a good link neighborhood. A bakery linked only from casino directories, essay mills and sites that exist to sell links sits in a bad one.

SEOs use the phrase most in its negative form. A "bad neighborhood" means a cluster of spam sites, link farms, private blog networks or link exchange rings, and linking with a bad neighborhood is treated as a warning sign of low quality or manipulation.

The term is about who links to whom. It does not describe a site's server, hosting company or geographic location.

Google does not publish a link neighborhood metric, and the phrase "bad neighborhood" does not appear in Google's current Search Essentials [5]. But Google's guidance still rests on the same idea: links signal association, and Google acts on links that exist to manipulate rankings.

Two pieces of current Google documentation carry the concept:

  • Outbound links. Google says to use nofollow "when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site" [3]. That is the link neighborhood idea in Google's own words: a followed link associates your site with the destination.
  • Link spam. Google's spam policies list "excessive link exchanges ('Link to me and I'll link to you') or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking" as link spam [4], which describes the clusters of sites SEOs call bad neighborhoods.

How Google measures a neighborhood internally, and how much any one connection matters, is not public. Any claim that a single link to or from a bad site will sink a site's rankings goes beyond what Google has published.

Where did the idea of a bad neighborhood come from?

The idea of a bad neighborhood came from the link farm era, when groups of sites linked to each other purely to raise their rankings and search engines began filtering those groups out. Being linked into such a group became a mark against a site.

1999: link farms appear

Link farms emerged in 1999, when SEOs exploited the Inktomi search engine's reliance on link popularity [1]. A link farm is "any group of websites that all hyperlink to other sites in the group for the purpose of increasing SEO rankings" [1]. When Google introduced PageRank, link farms adapted to game it [1].

Early 2000s: search engines filter whole groups

Search engines learned to recognize link farm patterns and filtered affected pages from their indexes, and in some cases entire domains were removed [1]. A site's links into and out of those groups now carried risk, which is where the neighborhood framing took hold.

2005: nofollow lets sites opt out of vouching

In early 2005, Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen of Blogger proposed rel="nofollow" to deal with comment spam [6]. Nofollow gave site owners a way to link without vouching, so a spammer's comment link no longer tied a blog to the spammer's site.

2012: Penguin targets link schemes

Google launched Penguin on April 24, 2012, affecting about 3.1% of English queries [2]. Penguin targeted link buying, link farming, automated links and private blog networks [2].

2014: manual actions against private blog networks

In September 2014, Google began issuing manual action penalties against private blog networks [1]. Search Insider does not support or suggest the use of private blog networks.

2016: Penguin discounts links in real time

From September 23, 2016, Penguin ran in real time as part of Google's core algorithm. Rather than demoting sites, Penguin 4.0 discounts manipulative links, ignoring them so they no longer count toward rankings [2].

A bad link neighborhood today mostly costs a site the value of its links rather than triggering a penalty. Since Penguin 4.0, Google's default response to manipulative links is to ignore them [2], so a site whose links come from a spam cluster typically finds those links count for nothing.

Penalties have not disappeared. Google says it detects policy violations through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action, and that violating sites "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all" [4]. A site that actively takes part in a link scheme, rather than merely being linked from one, is the case most at risk.

The difference between a link neighborhood and a link farm is that a link neighborhood is a way of describing any site's connections, good or bad, while a link farm is one specific kind of bad neighborhood: a group of sites built to link to each other for rankings [1]. Every site has a link neighborhood. Only some sites are part of a link farm.

Link neighborhoodLink farm
What it isA description of a site's link connectionsA group of sites built to interlink
Good or bad?EitherAlways manipulative
Who has oneEvery siteOnly sites inside the scheme
Covered by Google's spam policies?Not as a termYes, as link spam [4]

To check a site's link neighborhood, look at the sites it links to and the sites linking to it, and ask whether each looks like a real site with a reason to make that link. A backlink tool lists the referring domains; the outbound links can be read from the pages themselves.

Warning signs of a bad neighborhood:

  • Pages that are mostly links. "Partners", "resources" or "friends" pages with dozens of unrelated outbound links, which Google's spam policies describe as partner pages that exist for cross-linking [4].
  • Unrelated topics. A plumbing site linked from, and linking to, gambling, pharmacy and loan sites.
  • Reciprocal clusters. The same handful of sites all linking to each other.
  • Low-quality directories and bookmark sites. Google names "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as link spam [4].
  • Sites that sell links openly. Pages advertising "do-follow guest posts" with no editorial standard.

Check the neighborhood of any site before you buy an ad on it, accept a guest post, or join a partnership. A site that links out to everyone who pays will put your link among them.

What you should do about a bad link neighborhood depends on which direction the links run:

  • Links from your site to bad neighborhoods. Remove them, or mark them rel="nofollow" if they must stay, so Google does not associate your site with the destination [3]. Mark user comments ugc and paid placements sponsored [3].
  • Links to your site from bad neighborhoods that you did not build. Usually no action is needed, because Google's default since 2016 is to ignore them [2].
  • Links to your site from bad neighborhoods that you did build. Stop, ask for removal where possible, and stop any exchange or network arrangement. These are the links Google's spam policies describe [4].

The lasting fix is to build a good neighborhood instead: links from real businesses, publications and organizations in your field, and outbound links to sources you would recommend to a reader.