bad neighborhood

“Bad neighborhood” is old SEO shorthand, not a phrase in Google’s current documentation. Google’s spam policies never use it. They describe “link spam” as links created mainly to manipulate rankings, and list link farms, paid follow links, and low-quality directories as examples. So treat the term as a useful mental model, not an official Google category.

Which direction the risk runs

The mechanics differ depending on which way the link points.

Being linked FROM a bad neighborhood. Since Penguin went real-time in 2016, Google usually ignores or devalues spammy inbound links rather than demoting your whole site, most junk backlinks simply do not count. John Mueller has cautioned that when Google “can’t isolate and ignore these links” and sees “a very strong pattern,” its systems can lose trust in the site overall. That site-wide skepticism is the exception, not the default.

Linking OUT to a bad neighborhood. This is the direction you actually control, and the riskier one. In April 2026 Mueller said that if Google sees a site “links out in a way that’s not very helpful or aligned with our policies,” it may ignore all outbound links from that site. Selling follow links or stuffing pages with links to spam can quietly strip your own links of value.

Practical checks: audit your referring domains and outbound links, watch for a small pool of sites linking only to each other with no real audience, tag paid or untrusted outbound links with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", and reserve Google’s disavow tool for links tied to a manual action you cannot get removed.