Good And Bad Linking Practices

Practices that can be considered 'good' are as follows...

• Submit your side to reputable directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo directory. The former is free and the latter is paid for. Both are human edited and do not accept sites deemed to be of low standard.
• Only link exchange with other website which are relevant to your website. Irrelevant link exchanges can be regarded as spam resulting in a lower rating of your website as a whole. You can also link to relevant pages without an exchange. It will not penalise your site or result in 'pagerank leakage' provided that the site that you link to is relevant and does not engage in black hat SEO.
• Use links within the content of your site that make use of anchor text made up of keywords that you are trying to promote.

The following are practices which are best left avoided with regards to links...

• When you have a link in the content of your page, avoid the use of images or the text "click here" to represent the link. This is because Google uses the anchor text found in links to help determine the keywords that are best associated with a particular webpage.
• Keep away from any link farm or link exchange program run by websites that engage in spam or black hat SEO. And do not link to sites which are irrelevant to your website as this will confuse Google's keyword appraisal of your website.
• Check your site for broken links and fix them as soon as possible. Google webmaster tools automatically warns you of broken links if your site is too large to check manually. There are also a large variety of free link check tools available to use.
• Do not obfuscate any links on your site as, although difficult to detect, once found out will result in a penalty imposition upon your website. Link obfuscation is as serious as hidden text. This includes using a full stop or period to link to a page or a 1 pixel area image.
• Do not sell links. As of 2007, the selling of links without nofollow is in breach of Google's webmaster guidelines unless your website is a reputable directory or where the advertising link is declared prominently as such. If you sell links whose purpose is to manipulate rankings then a competitor could report this to Google to ban your site.
• Do not buy links from websites that exist only to sell links. This is to prevent website owners from buying many links in order to manipulate their rankings.
• Do not insert keywords excessively. If you are worried that your use of your site's keywords may have been overzealous then there is a wide variety of free keyword density tools that give you the percentage of text used on your site that are keywords. Reduce the number of keywords used if it exceeds 30%.

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