Link building is possibly the hardest part of any SEO program. The best links are natural one way links that have been created by someone linking to one of your pages through their own content.Sometimes it can be tempting to accept links from unknown entities. If these are link farms then you could be putting your site at risk.

Link farms can generally be identified through a number of areas. These include:

Mass links: A site that has pages of unrelated links is definitely not worth linking too. It doesn’t what it’s ranking is – somewhere along the way the search engines will penalize it for link farming. They will also penalize all the links associated with the site.

Little Content: Sites that little in the way of content will gain a decent ranking. If the site is not going to develop a decent ranking then it is not worth linking to anyway.

Owner Interaction: Does it look like the site is being maintained, or has it been thrown together and left to fend for itself with the only interaction from the webmaster, the inclusion of new links.

I have one simple rule when it comes to link building and link farms. If it doesn’t look right, then don’t accept any link arrangements. In fact I will go one step further and suggest you only enter into link arrangements when the site is closely associated to your own genre and has ranking that is worth linking to.

It should be remembered when developing links that a certain number of selective two way links are quite acceptable to search engines – just don’t overdo it. Link building is a process that should be natural and should appear to the casual viewer as a natural progression from one site to the next.

Recent Entries

• Why A Search Engine Googopoly Is Bad For The Internet
• Blogging For The Sake Of Blogging Is Not Blogging
• How To Create An Effective Social Marketing Tweet
• Internal Linking – Don’t Be Afraid Of The Long Tail
• Adding Your Scotland Based Local Business To AOL
• Don’t Be Too Quick To Dismiss Google Buzz
• Are Guest Posts A Bad Link Building Strategy?
• Can You Overdo SEO?
• Review Sites And SEO For Scotland Local Businesses
• What Effect Will HTML5 Have On Web Design And SEO

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 5:53 am and is filed under Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.