Now keeping everything I have mentioned in mind, if you were a search engine would you be excited about this? The answer is you wouldn’t. You would realize that your algorithm heavily relies on measuring backlink popularity and you would see these programs as a major “loophole” manipulating your algorithm. Google has already taken steps to combat this issue so the practice is mainly only effective on Yahoo and MSN.

If you’re taking the long-term approach why use techniques that you’re pretty sure will be eliminated in the near future? Given time the following practices will surely stop benefiting you in every major search engine:

• Mass Link Exchanges • Interlinked Networks • Sitewide Links • Subdomain Networks • Duplicate Content Pages/domains • Off-Topic Links • High PR Off-Topic Links • Directory Spam • Blog Spam

Inferring The Future Through understanding how a search engine operates and what its overall goals are we can easily infer what backlink strategies are likely to work in the future. Reading their most recent patents is also a major help. Backlinks will factor heavily in search engine algorithms for the foreseeable future. Knowing this we just have to acquire the kind of backlinks that won’t loose their power when search engines adjust their algorithms.

Long-term Recommendations: The web is becoming more compartmentalized every day. You will need to acquire backlinks from related sites only. It is illogical for a search engine to give your website a rankings boost from unrelated links so don’t waist your time gathering them. Ask yourself; is it harder to get 500 links from sites highly relevant to your domain or 5000 links from unrelated sites? Anyone who as every ever entered a link exchange program knows the answer to that question, and so do the search engines. Google is already acting on this, the rest will follow.

Gather as many one-way links as you can. If a majority of your backlinks are generated through reciprocal link exchanges what would that tell a search engine? A search engine would have to assume that your content was not valuable enough for other webmasters to link to it naturally or that your content was not as valuable as other sites with one-way links. Would you want to rank a website highly if most of their backlinks were given because of an exchange or affiliate link? Of course not, that would leave your search engine wide open for manipulation.

Place your links in high value areas. It is fairly easy for a search engine to determine the different zones of your website. Most sites have a header section, navigation section (usually on the top or left side), a main content section and a footer section. Where do you think most link spam appears? You guessed it, the footer section and just after the navigation. You will start to see links in low value areas being diminished and links in high value areas such as the main content section of a site receive a boost. There are already several search engine patents that touch on this subject the main one being MSN’s Block Level Analysis.

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