Choose your outbound links carefully

Choosing your outbound links (who you link to) is very important. Linking to a websites that search engines consider a 'bad neighborhood' can penalize your website. Linking to a non-related website can penalize that website.

Bad neighborhoods

If your website links to a website that a search engine considers a 'bad neighborhood' your website is likely to gain a penalty. Search engines impose this penalty to reduce the profile of websites that are affiliated with poor quality sites, such as spammers or link exchange schemes. You should have no involvement with any website that is of a poor quality. This does not mean its graphical design, but rather its purpose and service. A website that looks bad but offers good original content is still a good quality website. Search engines generally care not for the layout of a website. A website that has a good graphical design, but has no original content, is a link exchange scheme, or is a gambling related website you should have no involvement with. Including linking to it.

Linking to non related websites

If you have several websites that you are tying to promote with SEO, there is often a temptation to places a link from each website, to each of your other websites from the homepages. Previously this gave a reasonable boost to search engine rankings. However search engines now consider this an SEO trick and can penalize the site receiving the inbound links, as this is an unnatural way of linking. Don't link to un-related websites, just to improve their SEO. Link to related websites, using good anchor text, as these are considered natural sources of links.

This is particularly important if a website is new. Search engines such as Google may 'sandbox' the website if the website gains lots of links quickly, especially from non-topic related websites.