Linking to PR 0 Penalty?

[Breckenridge Real Estate]

I just read the following article about Link Proctor, a link checking program:

http://ez-search-engine-optimization...nk-proctor.htm

What concerns me are the following parts of this article:

How many hours do you spend checking up on your link partners to make sure they:

c) Have not been penalized by Google and PR 0'd which would mean Google would in turn penalize you for linking to a bad neighborhood?

To rank well in Google you need to make sure you are not linking to any penalized sites - the so-called "bad neighborhood" sites.

If your link is on a PR 0 site, that site may have been penalized by Google. If they have been penalized, so will you if you link to them.

I have only just begun to learn about how Search Engines work, and much of what I have come to understand I have gathered by reading this forum.

One of the things I have come to believe is that PR is no longer meaningful, or at least not nearly as much as it had been, and that ensuring that the page linking to you is cached by Google is what counts.

Could some of the more knowledgeable people here please address my current understandings in the context of this article?

Thank you!

[SEO Jason]

all sites created within the past 4 months will be PR0, despite being cached by google and possibly having really good SERPS. Regardless you shouldn't be linking with a site that could be penalized. So you should take a look at the site before you link with it. See if there doing anything that Google might penalize them for. Saying your not going to link with them because they do stuff Google doesn't like, may bring awareness to them that Google doesn't like it, or may make them think more about it if they know it's bad.

[Breckenridge Real Estate]

Jason, thank you for the good advice! Unfortunately, I may not be qualified to follow it. I just do not know that much about what Google does not like. I am sure someone more knowledgeable than I could be doing all kinds of things that Google does not like and I would not know it.

Does the fact that the index page and/or the links page is cached and/or shows PR in Googlebar tell me anything about whether or not the page has been penalized or banned by Google?

[SEO Jason]

no, it tells you nothing about it. If the site has like tonnes of backlinks, yet doesn't rank well for the keywords it's been targeting, is usually a good sign. Stay away from anything that looks like a link farm or spammy. You shouldn't run into any problems with actual realtors sites you know. That's what I choose to link with. I stay away from sites like reals.com, linkexchange.com, etc. Just remember, you can't get penalized for someone linking to you, and your not going to get penalized for linking to an actual realors site, you know.

[ResaleBroker]

I stay away from sites like reals.com, linkexchange.com, etc.

Reals.com? Really?

Now I'm concerned.

Any chance we could start compiling a list of common sites real estate sites link to that should be avoided. Even a partial list?

[SEO Jason]

Well, if you notice my sites don't link to them. if i were you i'd just only list to realtor's sites. There's thousands and thousands of them to link with. Why link with the spammy sites?

[ResaleBroker]

If you say get rid of them, that's good enough for me. I'll have them off in a jif!

[SEO Jason]

I don't have proof anymore. But what's the need when thousands of realtors out there to link with that are legitimate link partners.

[ResaleBroker]

I agree. I'm removing links from my site right now.

[Breckenridge Real Estate]

I stay away from sites like reals.com, linkexchange.com, etc.

So I expect that you would not ant to link to anything at the bottom of this page:

http://www.amenta.com/friends/index.htm

or the top of this one:

http://www.amenta.com/links/web.htm