Linking from a Baaaad Neighborhood Can Shred Your SEO
Why Move?
Bad Neighborhood Links are Bad News
It is no secret that linking to and from a bad Internet neighborhood can seriously slow, halt or even reverse your SEO progress. However, now, I have first hand knowledge of what can happen when even a single source has cross links with a site in a good neighborhood.
We recently moved my personal blog to my company site - which is where you are reading this. Initially, we thought it might be a great way to get some inbound links with linking text being exactly what we wanted it to be.
We soon found that in actuality, cross links from XPRT Creative to http://jpoyer.wordpress.com began a slow descent of XPRT Creative ranking in Google, Yahoo and MSN SERPs. As we monitor how our site ranks for certain keyword phrases, we deleted the cross links and almost immediately, our PR5 XPRT Creative site began rising again in the ranks. We cycled this two different times to make sure that was the only change and that we were tracking the right factors in the descent.
We were careful to control our SEO efforts so we could target the effect of the subdomain.wordpress.com cross links. We theorize that for smaller, getting started sites this could be a detrimental mistake… what immediate effect a “bad neighborhood” link fest could have on a budding site!!
To extend the experiment, we left some cross links in - not only left a few, but added more over the course of the past two or three months. The descent has been a dramatic change with certain keywords, all of which have dropped from page 1 or 2 in the results to page 48 and counting. Some have dropped off results altogether.
Good Content Builder
The cross links are removed and the blog is now hosted where it should be, on our company site. Not only will this remove the cross link issue, but it will also provide continual content additions for our company site, which should help to reverse the damage from the extended experiment.
Yahoo has a tendency to think more pages mean higher site value, so we believe that we will see a very positive result in our Yahoo search results over the next year.
Broader Range of Subject Matter
With an official company blog, it is totally appropriate and necessary to have other XPRT Creative team members join in the posting efforts to post more often and with varying perspectives on specific issues. We are looking forward to the prospect of growing our blog and company site to better portray our services, quality of work and business integrity.
Additionally, we are not depending on the WordPress abbreviated stats to tell us more about our blog traffic. This is a good deal all the way around.
So … now the work begins.
© 2008 XPRT Creative