Bad neighbor is the reverse, you linking to them and the site is malicious. It’s important to review your comments and the links that each commenter is providing. There’s no way you would get penalized because some malicious site adds your link, that would hurt all sites.

~ Kristi

I always wondered if black hat SEO’s use that as a tool to fight competitive sites? Anyone can put up a spam site and link from there to a competitive site. And Google can’t know!

Within the first two months or so of regularly updating content on his site he started showing up strongly for a few different keywords. He was number one for his name “Jason Zuckerman”, number 3 for the term “Sketch of the Day”, and had several other strong SERP’s. All of a sudden the organic search traffic which had been building dropped off the face of the earth.

His site was still indexed by google, but after several weeks of no recovery in his SERP’s I submitted a reinclusion request out of frustration. Not sure really if that was the right thing to do in retrospect.

I saw a modest improvement after several weeks, but certain SERP’s never recovered. Even on his name right now he comes in second to a site of lower page rank and as far as I can tell comparable keyword density for his name. He also has his full name in the url which should be an advantage I had thought. Occassionally, I will see him at number 1, but more often he is second.

I also observe a yo-yo on “jay zuck” from as high as one to as low as the mid 40′s. If you search “jay zuck” you will get almost exclusive references to his site which I think is odd for a site ranking in the 40′s often for that very term.

The other odd thing is that google images traffic has increased over the months and continues to grow even while the general search remains low. It is a real brain scratcher for me, but I put it to you if you have any perspective on this.

Finally, on Yahoo he comes up 3 on “Sketch of the Day” and 1 for his name and “jay zuck” which has the net result of me feeling mocked by google.

I wish I was a regular of this site ages ago and had read an article just like this. Great and sobering stuff on the dreaded google penalty.

Paid content and text link ad was once the reason for google penalty but now google seems to be okay with them. Even google search shows you have 100′s of pages indexed; you can see the real picture in the new webmaster tools. It will say, 100 pages submitted and 80 pages indexed.