What is a
link neighborhood?

What Is a Link Neighborhood?

A link neighborhood refers to a group of sites that are connected by links. Both internal links and external links on a given web page send signals, both to readers and to web crawlers. If you think of this in terms of a neighborhood, in this scenario, the houses are the websites, and the streets are the links that bring them together. There are two different ways that link neighborhoods are created:

1. External Links: Sites that you link to on your site (including internal linking to your own content);
2. Backlinks: Sites that link to your site.

To elaborate, if you have a site that offers outdoor equipment, and you link to a hunter’s education site, you are now associated with that site. The same is true if the hunter’s education site decides to link to your site. The links that surround this link comprise the link neighborhood.

What Is a Good Link Neighborhood?

It can be easier to understand what a good link neighborhood is by thinking of it as a literal neighbor. If you take pristine care of your home, you want your neighbors to take care of their houses too — watering the lawn, pulling weeds, cleaning up trash, etc. When you have a nicely kept house, it becomes a place that people are more drawn to. The same is true for sites that you associate with. When you link to a site, you want them to have a polished site. The user experience should be optimized for ease of use and readability; the content should be credible, trustworthy, and authoritative. You might look twice at the authorship, the brand equity, and other signals of quality and credibility on the sources you cite. When you are acquiring links, or choosing sites to link to, you want to ensure that they are relevant to your audience, that they offer high-quality, unique content, and that the site is indexed by Google.

What Is a Bad Link Neighborhood?

When you are surrounded by poorly-taken-care-of homes, it reduces the value of your own home. The same is true for link neighborhoods. The following factors can help determine a bad link neighborhood:

• Bad Links: these are links that lead to the three P’s: pills, porn, and poker;
• Bad Content: when content is poorly-written, its value decreases tremendously. This includes inaccurate or misleading information, spelling and grammatical errors, misleading anchor text/internal citations, etc.; 
• Excessive Ads: when you have an abundance of ads, it can take away from the effectiveness of an article (even if it is well-written). This is especially true of sites that are hosting topically unrelated ads;
• Excessive External Links: when you externally link to a site, you are pointing to the site as the authority for the information you are mentioning. While this is necessary at times, doing so excessively can take away from your credibility for speaking on the topic;
• Spam: unrelated information, unnecessary comments, irrelevant linking, and repeating key phrases excessively can come across as a spammy black hat SEO technique. This can diminish the value of your site;
• Unrelated Links: sites that are unrelated — either topically, or the target audience/niche —  do not generally offer any value to your site.