Does anyone have proof of G banning 'bad neighborhoods' ?

[MathsIsFun]

I am not so sure about a duplicate content ban, dejaone.

This has been discussed before, and if there were an actual "ban", then mirror sites, content syndication sites, etc. would suffer.

I think it is more along the lines of Google being smart how it shows results - if it finds two almost identical pages that match your search words, it will choose one to show up front.

[Kenai Alaska]

Traffic Power

AKA 1p.com and now internetadvertising1.com
We are noticing their work in more and more results lately and our email has been receiving offers from them too. This needs to be publicized more to make the business owners more aware of the potential problems of dealing with them.

[ppayne]

I had my years long blog (J-List updates) on an old site, and I moved the posts to Blogger. I got indexed by Google for a week, then the Blogger blog disappeared, presumably because of the duplicate content with my old site. I deleted the old site completely and hope I'll reappear in Google soon.

[LinkMaster]

After much research on this subject, here's the conclusion that I have come to. Google may ban or penalize for certain offenses (listed in the initial post of this thread), but they do not seem to ban or penalize websites that link to the banned sites.

Here's something to consider. What if someone posted something on an SEO forum regarding a website that has been banned by Google something like this:

I just found out that Google has banned the following website:

www.somedomain.com

Does anyone know the reason that Google has banned this website?

The next time Google crawls the SEO forum that this post was placed on, they will find that it is linking to a "bad neighborhood". Is Google then going to penalize the forum webmaster for linking to this banned website? That's the $40,000.00 question. All of my research seems to conclude that Google will not penalize anyone for linking to a website that has been banned or penalized by Google.

Google's guidelines simply serve to tell webmasters which types of content they should avoid putting in their own websites in order to be "Google friendly". They don't seem to have any rules or guidelines regarding which type of websites you shouldn't link to that would bring about a penalty by Google for linking to them.

Here is an excerpt from the Google Terms Of Service:

The sites displayed as search results or linked to by Google Services are developed by people over whom Google exercises no control. The search results that appear from Google's indices are indexed by Google's automated machinery and computers, and Google cannot and does not screen the sites before including them in the indices from which such automated search results are gathered. A search using Google Services may produce search results and links to sites that some people find objectionable, inappropriate, or offensive. We cannot guarantee that a Google search will not locate unintended or objectionable content and assume no responsibility for the content of any site included in any search results or otherwise linked to by the Google Services.

Google stated that, although they may link to sites that are questionable, they do not take responsibility for their content. That raises the question - would Google penalize anyone else for linking to these same questionable sites? My conclusion is that they would not.

Can anyone else concur with my assumptions?

[LinkMaster]

I seem to have found that several sites similar to link2you.com have been banned from Google. My question would be, did the sites participating in their program get banned from Google also? If so, was it because they were linking to the banned site? If that were the case, then every site that did a review of links2you.com would have been banned also if they had a hyperlink pointing to the links2you.com website.