How to Safely Link to Bad Neighborhoods

Have you ever wanted to trade links with a web site that gets a lot of traffic, but you were afraid that the search engines would penalize you for trading links with them? This is often the case when considering a link trade for the purpose of getting qualified direct traffic from another web site that uses “black hat” SEO, or is associated with the dreaded terms: Viagra, Online Pharmacy, or any other “Bad Neighborhoods” on the web.

Most search engines these days are asking webmasters to use what’s called a “no follow tag” inside the link code, which says “Hey, we want to link to this web site, but we don’t necessarily support the content or SEO methods used by the webmaster over there“.

How to Add a No Follow Tag Into a Link

The < and > characters in the following code have been replaced with start and finish parentheses, and the ” characters have been replaced with + characters. This is so the code doesn’t actually get “turned on” in the blog, as it is important that you actually see it.

Here is a normal link to The president’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports:
(a href=+http://www.fitness.gov+)Click Here Or Some Other Text(/a)

Here is a no follow link to The president’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports:
(a href=+http://www.fitness.gov+ rel=”nofollow”)Click Here Or Some Other Text(/a)

And here is a link to The president’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports that uses both the no follow tag AND opens in a new window so users don’t have to leave your site:
(a href=+http://www.fitness.gov+ rel=”nofollow” target=”blank”)Click Here Or Some Other Text(/a)

Again, don’t forget to replace ( with < and ) with >. Also, replace the + signs a ” character.

I do apologize for this, but the blogger software was automatically hyperlinking the URLs and it would not turn off. If anyone has any suggestions of how to get around this without using replacement characters, I would love to hear about it.

Now you can link to any site without fearing the dreaded heavy hand of Google!