Receiving QUALITY links from QUALITY sites could prove to be a very helpful way to increase your ranking in the major search engines. Too often, people think that more is better. In SEO, this translates a lot of the time into black hat SEO. “Bots” are becoming increasingly more intelligent and thorough with their inspections. Below are the main link practices that should be avoided, according to WebConfs.com:
- Bulk purchasing of links. “Bots” are easily going to become suspicious of your credibility if hundreds of websites create a link to your site on a daily basis. “Bots” keep track of these link farms and will penalize or even ban your site completely.
- Link exchanges. This could be helpful as long as:
- The other party keeps their promise
- The other party does not change the context the link appears into
- You do not seem to be “married” to another site and 50% or more of your inbound and outbound links are from/to this direction
- Poor link balancing. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times your inbound links, this is bad but it also varies on a case-by-case basis.