You can judge a blog by the company it keeps.

I recently turned down an application to join the 30 day blogging program because the blogger in question was linking to questionable websites. Although the applicant maintained his innocence and said that the websites he was linking to were, and I quote, “just a bit of fun”, I had good reason to not wish to be associated with him.

If you link to questionable websites, anything illegal, NSFW, warez or something along those lines, then your blog will become questionable, in peoples minds and in the all seeing eye of Google, by association. Your reputation will nose dive and your traffic will follow. And, worse still, with the internet having a seemingly limitless capacity to record every bloggers every word and preserve it for posterity, your reputation will not be recovered easily if at all.

Take some time to check your links, visit the websites you link to and remove anything that could damage your reputation. You’ll probably be lucky and find nothing to worry about. But, with so many websites and domain names changing hands, you’ll never know for sure unless you check.