Is there a way to check whether a specific site is being linked to from bad neighborhoods by a competitor or other similar things like that, in order to de-rank it in Google? I've been told this is being done to one of my sites, but I'm clueless on how to check it out or fix it.
by "bad neighborhood" you mean adding your website in guestbook spams and such then I would say google, doesn't penalize you for such. They just ignore the link. If this was true then a lot of number one sites would be down to the last page. I would say the only way you can outrank someone in google listing is by beating him in search engine optimization. And by that a lot of factors come in (backlinks, domain age, pr, etc.)
I'm not really seeing my sites outranked for the obvious keywords exactly, more liked knocked down a zillion spots in the results all of a sudden. For example, the main sites for my primary brand were all on page one of Bing results when it launched, but now most of nowhere to be found. One of my primary sites appears to have the -900 or whatever penalty on it in Google, but I have no idea why. Other than that people I know have told me a a particular competitor may know how to make the sites look problematic to the search engines with where they link to them from and that sort of thing.
your google headstart for n sites has expired. check your site with backlinkwatch.com and check for spammy links you did not create. Posted via Mobile Device
I'm getting "Your website has not backlinks to report. -- Go on .. and build backlinks first " for anything I try to enter, including cnn.com.
You are right. It is loading now. The domain I'm most concerned about says 26237 links in the backlinkwatch tool, so I guess this will take a while to load. So far, the main things I have noticed are that a number of the pages linking in have a lot of links on them. I also never realized Twitter is no follow, which seems wrong, but that's only one link, so I don't think it is a problem.
Also setup a Google Alert for "yourdomain.com" and a unique piece of content (several words) from your homepage in quotes. If you have any unique string of text sitewide like a unique copyright notice in the footer add that in quotes also. If someone scrapes you, spams links to your site etc you get an instant email letting you know exactly where so you can go check it out. When you see how your content/link is being used, you should be able to work out if they are doing it to harm you.
