Learn why websites are penalized

Think about that for a minute. If any of those could actually penalize your website, how many People do you think would simply add their competitor's websites to link farm websites,Unrelated websites and low PR websites? Unfortunately, it would be quite a few.
The only way you can get penalized by offpage optimization is if YOU link out to "bad
Neighborhoods", which would be:
 Link Farms
 Penalized websites (websites that are "gray barred" by Google)
Now, you would think this would be a pretty easy thing to stay away from, right? Wrong!
Example:
Take this case for example, Let's say I had a website and exchanged links with your website.
At the time that we exchanged links, both of our websites were very quality, related websites,with a Google Page Rank of 5. This would be an ideal link trade.
Ok, now several months go by, and in the meantime, I'm doing all kinds of "black-hat SEO”
Note: Black Hat SEO is simply doing all of the things that can get you banned by the search
Engines. I mentioned many of these in the previous lesson.
After doing all of this Black Hat SEO, Google decides to ban my website, which gives me a "Gray barred Page Rank" and I'm no longer in Google's index of websites. I'm completely gone from Google. So what, right? I mean, you could care less since it's not your website...
Well, guess what? You’re still linking to my website, which is now considered to be a "bad neighbor" and you could actually get penalized MAJORLY for linking to me, without even doing anything differently to your own website!
Think about that for a minute...
You could actually drop hundreds of search positions without even knowing what you've done wrong!
That is why it's very important to keep a close eye on who you're linking to. If you a do a link exchange with a website, check back to that website every once in awhile to make sure that they haven't been "gray barred" by Google.
This is one of the top reasons that people get penalized by Google, and the sad part is, they have no idea what they've done wrong because they haven't actually CHANGED anything on their website!
Any easy way to check on your link partners is to use the tool that I mentioned in chapter 4.
You can actually use to see if you are linking out to any bad neighbors. If you are,
then delete their link immediately and I can almost guarantee you will see an increase in your ranking.
Let's go over how I do this:
(Again, keep in mind that you should just do this manually if you don't have the software.)
Open up
Select radio button 4
Enter one of your links pages into the textbox
Select Google PR from the checkboxes and click "ok”
Will then visit each website that you are linking to and will tell you whether or not
they could be a possible "bad neighbor".
How? Well, let's have a look...