The Problem As with many rules/laws eventually people found a way to manipulate it. Sites were created solely to build link popularity of other sites. These sites are called ‘Link Farms’ and contributed to pollution of search engine results. They increased search engine rankings of many sites that did not deserve position they received.

Eventually search engines caught on to this deception and some such as Google adjusted their algorithms accordingly. Google now penalizes websites associated with Link Farms imposing penalties they deem appropriate based on site and scenario. Many people that felt effects of this penalization were fairly innocent, well that is if you consider ignorance to be an alibi. They simply did not know that what they were doing was wrong; some even paid for SEO services and were victims of bad services.

As search engines change their algorithms aiming to reduce fraudulent activities by webmasters, more and more ways are conceived to manipulate them, and so battle continues.

An Honest Link Building Strategy Getting quality links to your site from related resources is not always as easy as some make it sound. The key word here is ‘quality’. It is a very time consuming process and involves following steps:

* Search for quality sites that are related to yours. * Contact Webmaster of related site. * Wait for a response from them. * Swap links if response is positive.

There are also some automated methods of doing this that speed up process, however, I would not recommend any of them and hence won’t list them in this article.

So you have started your link building campaign and are hopefully seeing results. Now you say this is great but how can I make this process more efficient and effective without risking your good standings with search engines.

Here is solution.

Google made links important a couple years ago. They started to virtually ignore on-page factors (keyword density, title etc.) and focused almost exclusively on Links.

Google counts number of links to a web page (link popularity) and what those links say about a page (link reputation).

* Link Popularity and Link Reputation

So there's a common first mistake. Many people don't know difference between link popularity and link reputation. They think any link's good. Did you know that 20 links, with hyperlink text containing your keyphrase, can outrank 50+ links without a keyphrase ?

note: keyphrase means words you want your page to rank high for e.g. if someone searches on keyphrase 'email marketing' then you want most of links pointing at your page to say, 'email marketing' in their hypertext link.

Ever wondered why only your home page gets traffic ? People get links to their home page only, and don't even know they're making a mistake ! Google, in particular, sees a web site as a collection of individual pages, with each one ranking individually.

So, for example, if your home page gives info on 'email marketing', then you want lots of links saying, 'email marketing'. If one of your sub-pages gives info on 'email software' then that page needs its own set of links saying, 'email software'. Most people think any high ranking for their home page will automatically mean high ranking for other pages in same web site. It doesn't. Each page ranks individually.

* Internal Link Structure