- Link Farms
Well, even a child knows - link farms are evil, do not ever participate in link farms and so on and so further. What is link farm? It is a group of websites that simply link to each other. The technique worked very well in the beginning of 2000s due to a high influence of the link popularity parameter to the SERPs those days. Then search engines introduced a filter and now link farms value for SEO has only a negative consequences for your website position. Do not participate in link farms, do not create one either. - FFA (Free-For-All) sites
Another old as hell example of unavailing SEO method that works opposite the way it was supposed to work. The idea is to have a site that links to others, but the amount of links is limited and all links are shifted down every time a new link is submitted to FFA site. Practically, this means that thousands of webmasters submit their links to FFA and each particular link is only displayed about 5 minutes before it gets dislodged off the site by another load of links. Guess what SEO value such links have?
If you were hoping of getting a bunch of human traffic - you are wrong too. All the traffic on FFA site is generated by other webmasters submitting their links. Most of them do that automatically so they do not visit other links anyway. So this side of FFA value is negative too. Finally, FFA is often a way to collect working e-mails for the SPAM purposes, so summarizing all of the above: by submitting to FFA you get a 5-min link that nobody visits and tons of spam to your e-mail address. Sounds not too attractive, right? - Forum/Blog/E-mail Spam
Simply put - spam is spam. The first rule of the ethical SEO is: do not use spam methods. The second rule of the ethical SEO is: do not use spam methods! Read this carefully and remember: do not use spam methods. Ever. I'll curse you if you do.
Now, leaving the emotions behind, here is a more technical explanation of why the spam is bad.
o Spam pisses off forum readers, blog readers and owner, e-mail addressee.
o Spam links on forums or blogs are useless in the terms of SEO, because forums where you can freely post spam comments are usually of very low quality and thus such links won't give you any link juice. On the other hand, quality resources are usually human moderated and your spam comments won't pass through anyway.
o Someone can abuse your spam activity to SpamCop or other anti-spam freaks.
o Spamming requires abuse-proof hosting, abuse-proof domain registrar, abuse-proof payment processor and abuse-proof conscience. Do you happen to have all those?
- Paid links
Well... It was a hard decision whether to put the paid links into "Harmful stuff" part, or into "Useless", or into "Helpful"... Because paid links are all of these: helpful, useless and may hurt your rankings depending on how you use them. Personally, I never bought any links and I would not recommend doing so. The paid link is something that breaks up the whole concept of the WWW: "I link to it, because it is interesting or relevant" treating it to "I link to it, because I was paid for it". That's not linking, that's advertising. And that is why many search engines are treating paid links very cautious these days. The value of paid links is very low now and if Google somehow finds that a website prefers paid links over the natural ones it may get a penalty or get sandboxed.
Still, in despite of the above, paid links could be useful in promoting your website. However, you should keep in mind that since paid links are advertising, they must benofollow according to the google paid links. This way a paid link is simply promoting a website and does not lead to the transfer of the link juice to it. That's ok, but since the link is nofollow now you should keep a closer attention to where you buy the link from - that link must bring you relevant visitors. Choose appropriate websites that are close to your theme, check their trust rating, don't hesitate to make a phone call or an e-mail inquiry if you have any doubts about them. One high quality link is better than 10 garbage links, it doesn't matter whether the links are natural or paid. - Inappropriate neighbours
This works in two ways: a) if some unsavoury site links to you; b) if you link to some unsavoury site. Both are bad. The first case is bad, because it hurts the trust rating of your site. If a bad guy links to you - you're also a bad guy. The second is no better either - it directly hurts your ranking positions.
What do we mean under "inappropriate neighbours"? This are malware, porn, hack, fishing, casino and other websites of questionable kind. So do not link to such websites and try to not have any inbound link from them too, though you can't control that directly, of course. - Unrelated websites
Not as bad as the above, but still can bring your rankings down a bit. Try obtaining links from the relevant sources - websites of your own theme or at least related to it. Why? Because search engines not only consider the anchor text of a link, but also read the surrounding text preceding and following it and collate it then with the text of your site. If the subjects of both sites differ significantly - the link is filtered out and its value is neglected by a search engine. Simply put, it is better to have one link from a relevant site than five links from ones as far from your website as the Sun is from the Earth.
Off-page ranking factors summary
Let's summarize the above part of this SEO guide. Here is a quick synopsis of what you have already read:
- Good inbound link is a link from a relevant, high-PR site closely related to yours.
- Good inbound link has target keywords in its anchor text and around the link itself.
- Good inbound link points to a landing page made specially for each target keyword.
- Reciprocal links and directories still work, but don't expect miracles.
- Don't overlook social bookmarking sites.
- Article submission is useless.
- Do not spam.
- Paid links may both hurt and help. To avoid penalty, paid links must be nofollow.
- Keep your link neighbourhood clean and relevant.
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