http://www.sitepronews.com By Ben Kemp August 24, 2007
Link building strategies have, for most people for a long time, revolved around reciprocal link exchanges. Whilst most people understand that links are important, they generally don't understand why this is so. In a nutshell, a link to your site has traditionally been accepted by Search Engines as a vote for your site. A link from a topic or theme-related site to yours is better than a link from a site having a completely different topic. An important site's link to yours carries more weight - for example from The Open Directory, or Yahoo Directory. All pretty straightforward...
BUT... the rules have changed... significantly! All the thinking webmasters worked diligently to build links - willy-nilly - in order to subvert the search engine rankings and gain an advantage to themselves at the expense of everyone else.
For a long time, there have been mutterings about this, and comments from Google staffers about possible penalties from linking to "bad neighbourhoods'" and - heaven forbids it - buying links! Google et al simply don't approve of willy-nilly link-building schemes, and have recently tightened the screws a bit more, in two notable ways...
Bad Links Some links are bad... for example, if you are a car sales company and you've got dozens of completely irrelevant links to international hotel sites... yeah, YOU know the ones! in Prague, Munich, Shanghai etc! That's a BAD neighbourhood over there! That IS going to put a world of hurt on you! And as for the Free For All link sites, web rings, and 3 way link schemes... that's just suicide in cyberspace! Why? Coz its a blatant and completely indefensible attempt at cheating the system!
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