We've all heard the horror stories. You spend a lot of time building a great site, but you carelessly link to a site that the search engines consider spamy, and all of a sudden your site disappears from the SERPs. That's why you're very careful about who you link to and check your link pages for sites that may have changed hands often. But no matter how careful you are, you may still be linking to a "bad neighborhood".

You know those resources boxes you put on your pages along with syndicated articles. The ones with a link back to the author's site. You checked to make sure the link was to a reputable site before you posted it on your website, so there shouldn't be a problem right? Wrong! Things change on the Internet pretty fast. The site that was perfectly okay 6 months ago may be nothing more than a link farm or Spam fest today. Here's the scenario: You put up a great article from a great website. After a while, that great website goes under, and the original owner lets the domain name expire. Someone else picks up the domain name and throws up a made for Adsense page, a pop up farm, or even worse sets up drive by downloads of spyware. Now you're sending your visitors into a veritable cyber minefield. And the search engines will take notice.

So what do you do? First step is pretty obvious. Check your links. Just like you check everything on your links pages, check the links in all those resource boxes. It's a lot of work, but if you value your search engine rankings, not to mention your visitors' experience, you'll do it. The best way is to visit each article and click the link. You'll be surprised how many lead to 404 pages or link farms. You can also use an automated robot to do the same thing. I use Xenu. It's pretty good and free. But again, the best way is to use the human brain.

Now you've found an article linking to a website that no longer exists, what next? First thing you need to do is check with the syndication service where you got the article. They may have procedures that will tell you what to do next. If not, then you only have a few options. One you can leave the article and the link up on your site, but that's what we're trying to avoid. Two, you can remove the article completely. But that should be your last resort. The best course of action is to fix the link. Either point it to a new site, or disable it so search engines won't follow it.

If you have an email address for the author, write him or her explaining the situation. They may have a new perfectly clean site you can point the link at. If the new site isn't clean, then you need to make the decision of keeping the article along with the link or removing the article. If you don't have an email address, its time to make some decisions. You can either remove the link or remove the article. If you decide to remove the link, leave everything else in the resource box unchanged. Don't remove the authors name or copyright. What I do is leave the site's address as plain text and put a little note next to it saying that the site is no longer available. And always leave a way for the author to contact you if he or she stumbles upon your page. That way if they do have a new site, they can contact you to replace the link.

Using syndicated articles is a great way to provide content for your visitors and great way for authors to promote their sites. Both sites benefit. But don't get caught sending traffic to someone just because he bought a domain name with a bunch incoming links. When you use syndicated content you have a responsibility to link to the person who wrote the article, not to a third party who just happened to get lucky. And always remember, it's your site, you're responsible for who you link to.