Bad Neighborhood and it’s Effect on SEO

You may sometime experience that despite all your efforts you site is not getting a high ranking in search engines. Well, that may cause due to several reasons and one of them might be “Bad Neighborhood”

What is a Bad Neighborhood?
When you host your website on a shared hosting, you also get a shared IP Address. That IP Address may be being used in hundreds or thousands of website and you really cannot control them. If the majority of the websites that are using the same IP of yours are blacklisted site (i.e. gambling, porn, warez, and malicious software distribution) then search engines impose some kind of restriction on that IP Address or the Server. That makes the genuine webmasters to lose their rankings. This is what the bad neighborhood is.

Another theory of Bad Neighborhood is when you participate in bad Link Schemes (i.e. exchanging links, linking to them or getting links from them) with blacklisted sites which are on or not on your server.

How to check for Bad Neighborhood?
There are several ways to check for Bad Neighborhood in your server. None of the techniques are 100% perfect, but they’ll give you a general idea.

1. Reverse IP Lookup: You can perform a reverse IP lookup to check which sites are hosted on the same server and same IP Address. Then you may check each of the websites using same IP Address manually by going to each of them.
2. Google Safe Browsing: It’s not quite a Bad Neighborhood checking tool. It provides information on status of a website on Google if they found any suspicious activity from the website. With a little effort you can see if any of the sites on your server is red tagged. First, go here http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=domain (replace domain with your domain name). It’ll show the diagnostics page for your website. Then click on the like where it says “This site was hosted on xx network(s) including”. It’ll show if any site on the same IP Network having suspicious activity. Remember, you cannot check the type (porn, gambling etc.) of the website by this method.
3. Bad Neighborhood Checking Tool: This is an online tool that scans all the outgoing links on a webpage and categorizes them. This is not a 100% perfect tool, but it works.

How it effects SEO?
Bad Neighborhood was a real threat few years ago. With the advancement of algorithm that is being used in search engines, this is no more a threat. Search Engines understand that a webmaster cannot control the sites hosted on a shared hosting. At least Google thinks that way. There’s a video from Matt Cutts where he clearly explained what Google think on this.