Let's say you recommend a business associate visit another shop or office. If they find your recommendation to be worthwhile, and the people in the shop or office they visit are the type of people they want to do business with, they will probably thank you for the recommendation and their opinion of you will rise.

Let's say they get to the shop you have recommended and it's staffed by criminals and outlaws. Let's say that the shop really doesn't offer the service that it claims to. Your associate, quite rightly, would have a severely damaged view of you, and would be unlikely to heed any other recommendations you make.

The same applies online as it does in real life. You need to think very carefully about where your website links to. Building good outbound links will help with your search engine ranking. By good I mean relevant links, links to sites that 'do what it says on the tin'. Linking to bad sites can hugely adversely affect your credibility in the eyes of the search engine. You do very much become guilty by association.

What are 'bad' sites though? And are they easy to spot? Well, a bad site as far as Google is concerned is one that tries to lie. A site that pretends that it is something that it iss not. A site that uses unfair methods to try to build its own search engine rankings - for example overdoing the use of keywords in the text. Google also doesn't like domains that, for example are used for spamming, pornography or gambling.

How do you avoid these sites? How do you even know which sites they are? Well, that's an entirely different essay, or, you might like to employ one of the good seo specialists out there.