For my clients I tend to check on a monthly basis, who we link to, and what links those websites in turn link to. It’s not enough to make sure that the websites are live, rather one would need to check visually what is being display on these websites and where the links go to. Also it is important to monitor if sites are being dropped (i.e. failed to be renewed, and subsequently registered by someone else) or if they have recently changed hands. Being anyway associated with dubious domains has the potential to damage your SERPs (the so called “bad neighbourhood” effect). Often when these sites are bought or picked from the dropped list, the old version of the website will remain (or re-appear, scraped from somewhere like google cache or archive.org) and then over a period of time these dubious links will creep in. This all sounds like a bit of work, but in the end it can avoid damage to your online reputuation. It’s not enough just to have a google alert, which emails you whenever someone mentions your website/brand, online reputation management should start at home, on your website. Have a look at your older out going links to make sure that they still work and they still link to the website you intended to.
Just today there was a high profile case of the British Home Office linking to a Japanese porn site on BBC News.
4.8.2009
Yeah, valid point about checking links. There are a lot of aggressive guys who would buy out a nice little site and fill it with all kinds of weird stuff.
Also, I was doing some checking on Web2.0 properties are ranking well in Google these days. To do this, I use a few tactics. One is to check the results for aggressive keywords like “Buy Viagra” and see if there are an web2.0 sites ranking. Strange it may sound. But Justin.tv was ranking for some of these keywords through profile pages … aahhh u gotta love blackhats, they can rank anything. I even seen one of them rank a Google cache page …. sorry that was a bit of a rant ..
4.16.2009
A good point. Can be time consuming if you have a large site with 1000′s of pages of content. I use http://www.wintzell.net/seo-tools/domain-outbound-links-check.php which gives me a full list of all outbound links of the domain
4.17.2009
True Kieran, thanks for posting. David Naylor posted this week about something he spotted with MSN : http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/nbc-hit-with-google-penalty.html Something as serious as this can really loose you customers.
Thanks for your comment Leo (sorry had to change the username to something more relevant) . I’ve never user Wiztell.net, but I do have a few tools to automate things like this.