Quality Linking Leads to Higher Rankings

1. Links from sites with a high PageRank
   Links from sites with a low PageRank add quantity, but little quality. They may potentially increase your site's rankings but it's the sites with a higher PageRank that you should be seeking links from. Remember to check your potential link exchanges with other web masters, check their ranking, ideally you want one that is at least 200,000 higher than you in the same category of content.
   
   
2. Relevant link description text
   How other sites describe your web site is important. If you sell items, make sure you provide other sites valid short descriptions of your link that descibes your site including your company name and the item word, especially if it is a keyword on your site. Search engines' spiders figure that any words used in link text are particularly relevant. So if lots of sites linking to you use keywords in their link text, search engines will boost your ranking for those keywords. Work with other site masters to develope this relationship.
   
   
3. Links from relevant web sites
   If all the sites linking to your are about a particular industry such as graphics, then search engine spiders will assume that your site is somehow related to this theme. To maximize the quality of incoming links to your web site, seek links only from other sites in your industry.
   
   
4. Good internal linking structure
   If you'd like good rankings for pages other that your main one, create a good linking structure a spider can follow. Some search engine experts believe that Google counts internal links as backlinks. This means that creating a good internal linking scheme can potentially increase your rankings. So make use of breadcrumbs (i.e. links back to major pages on your site).
   
   
5. One-way links
   For many years, webmasters have tried to increase their sites' link popularity by swapping links or participating in link exchange programs. Google's PageRank gives preference to one-way links because they are more likely to be genuine, rather than a result of a link popularity campaign.
   
   
6. Avoiding “bad” links
   Ever since link popularity became an important ranking factor, webmasters and search engine marketers have looked for ways to increase it for their sites. Search engines understand that a site can artificially build up its link popularity, so they try to discount links that were created purely for this purpose. “Free-For-All” web sites, link farms and link exchange programs are no longer useful since Google and other web spiders can easily lessen the effect of links acquired through these techniques.
   
   A big temptation is to enter in to a paid linking farm such as an advertiser index, avoid this temptation. Do not use software that finds similar web sites for link exchange or buying text links from content networks. You may increase the quantity of incoming links to your site, but you are more likely to hurt your rankings in the long run if your inbound links look "fake".

What Hurts my Rankings?

Old ways of exchanging links and participating in links farms can harm your site.

1. Google penalizes links to spam sites
   If your site links to link farms or other spam sites, your own PageRank is likely to fall as a result. We suggest linking to other relevant, quality web sites instead.
   
   
2. Outgoing links diminish the page's link popularity
   If your web site has a page that's full of links, this page is unlikely to score high with Google. That's because Google's PageRank takes off points for many outgoing links and increases them for incoming ones.
   
   
3. Linking to spam sites can result in being placed in Google's supplemental index
   No one wants their site buried in Google's supplemental index it's backup database. Linking to spam sites and link exchange programs, however, is one of the things that can get your site out of Google's main results.