Where Do Your Back Links Lead?
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Search engines judge web sites by the company they keep. That’s why so many web sites work hard to get good back links. Do you know where all of your back links are coming from? Keep reading to learn what to avoid when building back links to your web site.
Most SEOs know that Google doesn’t show all of your links when you do the “link: your URL” search. There are a number of other tools you can use. Yahoo and MSN both have ways for you to check your back links. If you've registered your site so you can use Google's webmaster tools, Google just recently added a new tab that lets you do a more complete check of links to the pages of your web site. You can also do a Google search for back link checking tools. You may have to try out a number of tools before you find the one that works best for you; fortunately, most of them are free.
Once you know where all of your back links are coming from, you need to take a look at the sites. Whether these are links you have sought out or not, the search engines are going to take a look at them and decide where to put your site in the search engine results pages based on what they see. Ideally, a lot of the places and practices I’m going to be telling you to avoid in this article are ones that you should plan to avoid from the very start of your link building campaign.
First, avoid link farms. You’ve probably seen them; some of them may even be labeled “link farms” or have the phrase as part of the title of the page. Link farms are huge lists of links that may or may not be separated into categories (I’m talking more than 50 on a single page). Link farms used to have a real purpose in the early days of the web, when search engines weren’t very good at finding things. There may be something to be said for humans helping other humans to find things, but this won’t help you get a good place in the SERPs. Avoid them when you’re building your back links.
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