Bad neighborhood is an SEO term for a group of spam sites that a website is connected to through links. Examples are link farms or directories filled with spam, either linked to from your pages or linking to yours. The everyday meaning, an unsafe residential area, is not what SEOs mean here.
What Google documents
The term itself does not appear in the Google documents used for this entry. Google covers the topic under link spam, which it defines as “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings”. Examples include buying or selling links for ranking, excessive link exchanges and automated link generation.
For links you place yourself, Google offers rel attributes. Links marked nofollow, sponsored or ugc will generally not be followed. Use sponsored for paid links and ads, ugc for comments and forum posts, and nofollow when you do not want Google to associate your site with the target. Google states that paid links are not a violation as long as they are qualified with nofollow or sponsored.
The documents do not state that every link to a weak site harms your own site. Treat the idea as practitioner lore rather than a documented rule.
Where site owners check
- Outgoing links in comments, forums and user profiles.
- Unusual sources in the backlink profile.
- Pages that start linking to unrelated sites after a hack or a takeover (assessment).
Example
A forum lets members post links without any attribute. Over time many posts link to gambling sites. Adding rel="ugc" to member links tells Google that the forum does not vouch for them:
<a href="https://example.com/" rel="ugc nofollow">example</a>
Sources
- Spam policies for Google web search (link spam) – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Qualify your outbound links to Google – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
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