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.