Precaution to take before linking to a Website

Occasionally, you may get a request for a link exchange, or you may just want to link to a site as part of your post, or you just like the site. Before you link to any site, it is good to check the PageRank of the site. In the first place, it will be advantageous to you if you exchange with a site that has a higher PageRank than yours. However, any link relevant to your site content, whatever the PageRank (as long as that site is not blacklisted) helps in the ranking. More important is to find out if the site has been blacklisted by Google. A site may be blacklisted for doing black-hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) such as making certain keywords invisible by making the color of the font the same as the background, etc. It does not matter if a blacklisted site link to yours as Google knows you have no control over who link to you. However, you do have control over who you link to, and if you are unfortunate enough to link to a blacklisted site, your site will also be blacklisted.

The question now is, how can you find the PageRank of a site, or more important, how would you determine if a site have been blacklisted. You can do this easily by installing FireFox with Google toolbar (close new window to get back to this page). After installing FireFox with Google toolbar, you should surf over to the site using that browser and look for the the PageRank icon, let your mouse hover over the box in the icon and the PageRank of that site will be displayed with value from 0 to 10. If the box is grayed out, and no value (not even zero) is shown, that means that site had been blacklisted by Google and you should not link to that site. Otherwise, your site will be blacklisted as well.

Update 14 November 2006: Someone left a comment which contain a long unbroken and unclickable link which will cause my blog's sidebar to slide to the bottom of the page. This is the third time I may be forced to delete the comment (I have tried viewing this post in IE before deleting it, but suprisingly the sidebar is not affected so I have not deleted the comment yet. Took me some time because I was getting the error 500 message, but now it is viewable. Anyone viewing the post/blog with IE, I hope you will comment and let us know what you see w.r.t the sidebar). However, I reproduce part of the comment here: ""A completely gray PageRank toolbar meant that Google did not have that page listed in their index – either because the page was too new to have been indexed, or the page had been banned by Google.' therefore how can you say a grey out box means the site has been blacklisted." There seem to be some controversy over the interpretation of the Google toolbar PageRank icon, and hoping to clear this matter up, I have contacted Google for an authorative interpretation. I hope I get a response, and if I do, I will post it here. I am a scientist, and scientists like to experiment. So I have created a completely new blog with just one article and which should definately not have been indexed yet, and checked the PageRank with the Google toolbar icon. The PageRank toolbar was not grayed out but white, and the value shows zero. See the screenshot below (click on the screenshot to enlarge):
Google toolbar PageRank icon

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