Is your web site in a good or bad neighborhood?

A thread over at Search Engine Watch started with tips for finding specific niche directories or categories of directories to submit to. After some good suggestions, there was a caution to "beware of bad neighborhoods."

It's true that search engines use a variation of classifying good and bad neighborhoods that link to your site. A bad neighborhood is what Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine would classify a site or group of sites that participate in unnatural search engine optimization. The concept can be rather complicated to understand but Martinibuster and Marcia definitely help break it down. Both posts are good reads and informative if you are worried about getting involved with the wrong crowd.

Read this post from Martinibuster and then a further break down from Marcia.

Anchor Text, Keywords, and Directories

When submitting to a web directory, most webmasters, site owners and search engine optimizers want their listing to contain keywords in the anchor text. Most directories steer away from this type of linking because it is an unnatural way to list a resource and it isn't very user friendly.

Today, there was an excellent inquiry in the Search Engine Watch Forums...

"A question about directory listings. When one lists in directories, in a great majority of them, the hyperlinked anchor text is the company name. Thus it appears to me that each directory listing simply optimizes the business name, and not the keywords I want to elevate on the SERPs. Am I incorrect? Will directory listings impact my overall off-site optimization campaign (besides building PR)?"

The answer is "of course!" Here's why >>

Are "small" web directories in Google's crosshairs?

Not likely - but a Search Engine Watch moderator seems to have general data to at least have his "theory" heard:

DaveN writes: "I have been collecting quite a bit of data just recently and noticed that some WH sites got canned the only thing I can find is a large % of their IBL's are from directories..."

In my opinion, that data simply indicates bad SEO. Why are a large % of IBLs from web directories? Shouldn't the person in charge inbound link strategy focus on obtaining links from a variety of online resources?? Yes, a web directory will provide a relevant link to a web site but it seems unnatural to have the majority of IBLs coming from one type of resource. Based on the data provided by DaveN, I would say that these "white hat" sites got canned because of unnatural linking. Perhaps they should focus on getting links from a variety of relevant resources to help improve ranking within Google.