Don’t give yourself away. Its very surprising to me how many people will buy a textlink in a Sponsor or Advertisers section on a site. Unless you’re buying the link just for traffic, this is a horrible idea. Doing this is just begs the search engines to discount the links in that section. Why would they want to give you credit for a link you are telling them you paid for? Pages with names like “links.html” or “sponsors.html” are also obvious targets.

Blaze your own backlink trail. Stay away from large link networks. Buying and acquiring links from the same inventory pool that everyone else is using only makes your efforts that much more obvious. Spammers in your websites category will display very similar backlink patterns so make sure your backlinks don’t get flagged along with theirs.

Be wary of most link broker sites. Many brokers actually display the url of the sites they sell links on. If you can see the url so can a search engine. Many times, even if a broker does not display the exact url they will give out data such as the Alexa rank of the website. How hard is it for a search engine to do a reverse search based on the Alexa rank of a site? Brokers are also in the habit of placing textlinks in a link box with many other links. This screams out “Unnatural” to a search engine, especially if many of these links are not closely themed.

Summary: Quality over Quantity will eventually win out. Over the next few years all search engines will tighten the noose on backlinks. It is simply bad for business for them to allow the obvious manipulation that massive backlinks gathering is generating. Google is already leading the way and MSN and Yahoo are sure to catch up soon.

You need to start positioning your site for these inevitable changes. Skip the link exchanges, mass directory submissions, sitewide links, link networks and off topic links altogether. It’s only a matter of time until these techniques will no longer help your site. Place your links in the main content area for a site and make sure your links do not appear in low value sections like the footer, and that your links are not labeled as advertisements.

Instead, focus on gathering links that you would value if you were a search engine. Think about ways to get links from sites ranking in the top few hundred spots for your keyword phrases. These and other categorical links will show search engines that your site is respected within your own community. If you follow these simple tips now you will be positioned for long-term ranking success, while others are left scrambling to PPC when their 50,000 non relevant backlinks are no longer effective.

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