Linking to Penalized Pages – Be Careful!

Linking to a penalized website can really hurt your own website. This is why it’s very important to know who you’re linking to when not using the ‘nofollow attribute’ on your external links and internal links. This is known as ‘linking to a bad neighborhood’.

You can control what’s flowing in your website, and what’s pointing out. This is why Google will penalize you for linking to bad neighborhoods. Pointing an external link to a bad site will penalize the page that is pointing the link, and possibly your whole site. Not only does this apply to external links, this also applies to internal links to bad neighborhoods.

Here’s my recent experience:

I have a mortgage site with a  ’mortgage rates’ page that needs to be updated every day with new rates. Since this is not the homepage, and only a few numbers are being changed on the page, I can imagine that Google will penalize this page. They probably believe that I’m trying to manipulate the search engine by constantly changing the info on the page.

Since this is a mortgage rate page it’s very important to my users. The first thing they want to see are the mortgage rates. So I have to include a link all over my website to make sure it’s accessible, and to catch their attention when reading my content. Previously, I was ranking high for a lot of pages on a mortgage site, and noticed that these pages did NOT have a link back to the rate page. I went ahead, and changed the content of the page by just adding a link to the mortgage rate page.

Within 7-10 days all the pages dropped by 10-11 pages on Google. They were all on page 1, and now ended up on page 10 or page 11. I was trying to figure out why this happened since this was the only thing I changed on the website within that time period. I knew that Google had penalized my rate page before, and sometimes would deindex it. So I wondered if my recent change to the rate page had an effect on the rankings.

I went back a few days later, and did 2 things to test things out. I had about 10 pages with the internal link pointing to the rate page. I added nofollow to 5 pages that contained the rate link, and remove the rate link from the other 5. Within a few days all 10 pages were back on page 1 for their respective keyterms.

One of the common misconceptions is that Google will penalize a WHOLE site if one page is not within their guidelines. This makes sense, but we also must see that Google may penalized just that 1 page instead of the whole site. This is why it’s very important to pay attention to ALL the pages on your site. If you’re interlinking to that penalized page then the whole site can suffer as well! 

Just like the common cold it’s not hard to determine if an individual page is being penalized.

Here are the symptoms:

1. Individual page or site drops a few pages in rankings, and stays there. Some penalties may even be as small as 10 spots. If you were #1 then moved to page 2, then you may want to check your site if your position stays on page 2.

2. Green pagerank bar turns grey. If a page on your site has a Pagerank 0-10, then turns grey, you may want to pay attention to why it turned grey.

Pay attention to the use of ‘nofollow link attribute’ for external links AND internal links. Also, pay attention to the symptoms above or your whole site can suffer if you’re interlinking. I would recommend finding out first why the page is penalized, and trying to fix it before doing any major changes.

Read more of Robert Enriquez SEO tips on his SEO Blog