Backlinks have become very popular in SEO and search engines, especially Google, have started to give them more and more weight when ranking their returns. So I thought I would spend the next few posts talking about backlinks and their advantages and their pitfalls. I’ll be talking about interlinking, reciprocal linking, creating a backlinking campaign, backlink builder tools, and using anchor text.

But let’s get back to backlinking. As I said, backlinking has become so important that organizations have sprung up promising to help you with your backlinks. They claim that they will get more backlinks to your site, and therefore boost your traffic and your ranking.

The theory is, the more ‘quality’ backlinks, or Inbound Links (IBLs) a Web site has, the higher the search engine rates the site. The idea here is that when links come into your site from other sites, those Web sites have content that is related to yours and that they are linking back to you as a resource or as a reference. But the quality of the Web site linking back to you is also being scanned by the search engine, and they’re looking to make sure that you’re not trying to game the system. And if they determine that you are, then you can be banned from their site altogether. That means that no matter what you do in regard to SEO it won’t matter. You’ll never show up again on a Google search or an MSN search… or whatever your favorite search engine is.

It’s not worth the potential damage regarding SEO, but it’s also not worth the damage to your Web site and your reputation. In fact, you should be very much aware of the Web sites linking back to you. Just like you watch out for how companies are using your logos, making sure that they’re not violating your trademarks or patens, how they’re using your content… you should also be very much aware of whose linking back to you. Now I’m not saying that you go after everyone who links to you that you don’t think should be, but I am saying put this as a priority as well.

It seems easy to manipulate this feature, and you’ll probably get away with it for a while; but please remember that search engines have processes in place that look for just that contingency. And they’re watching for it, and they’re beefing up their systems to make sure they aren’t being manipulated.

In my next few posts I’m going to really dive into all this, but for now, you’ve probably run across a lot of ads for link farms (even though they probably have some fancy name that makes them sound benign) or you’ve received e-mail suggesting that you could really use their help. They make a lot of promises, to drive traffic to your site, help your rankings, end world hunger and help you win the Nobel Peace Prize. Please just mark these as spam and delete them.

Article Tags: anchor text | backlinking builder tools | backlinking campaign | backlinks | interlinking

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