quality links, and certainly cannot hurt your standing as long as you keep the content high caliber.
Choosing Your Links Wisely Last but not least, let’s share an important lesson about linkbuilding before you start spreading links everywhere you go. It’s not the quantity of links that matter but the quality. This means not only paying close attention to the article writing itself, but also to the anchor text (as in keyword placement and not just “click here to learn more!”) and to the site you are linking to. The search engines are looking for quality links all around so you do have to protect your reputation. Search engines can actually penalize you for hanging out with the “wrong crowd”, and that could include anything from poorly ranked article directories to spam sites or content mills, backdoor sites, plagiarists (or “scrapers”) and even web hosting companies that support such unethical sites. So, think twice before you so generously accept a random person’s request to exchange links. Your own reputation is on the line. Sometimes a new company site can have more leverage than a site that has suffered massive search engine penalties. In the next chapter, we’re going take SEO into the new age…the age of fast, accessible and fun social networking.
