Apr 15 2009
Links to steer clear of
We all (hopefully) know that links are needed to achieve good rankings in today’s search engines. It’s no longer as simple as the more the better though. Receiving links from the wrong source can potentially be one of the best ways to ruin a site’s ranking. Here are a few pointers to help steer away from linking bad practice:
Link farms: These are basically pages filled with links (often hundreds of them) that are designed to increase the rank of sites. Not only are the links from these farms often worth almost nothing in terms of PageRank, they can get you penalised. Steer well clear of them.
Reciprocal links: This occurs when two (or more) sites link to each other. Google and other search engines see this as a link that is not worth as much as a one way link. Otherwise, anybody with more than one site could easily gain PageRank simply by interlinking a network of sites.
Free-for-All links pages (FFA): This is a pretty old idea that you don’t see much of any more, but the idea is that you have a page where anyone can add links to the page, usually only after adding an email address. The links are usually pretty worthless and are only really useful for filling your inbox with spam. Again, steer clear of these if possible.
Simon Davies
SEO Programmer
