Links That Will Hurt Your Websites Ranking

As an affiliate marketing newbie You are told that generating back links to your website is a great way of improving your websites ranking with the search engines.

And this is in the main part true.

But there is a big 'but', a handful of 'buts' in fact.

There are links to your website that can actually reduce your ranking with the search engines, or even get your site banned. So by all means work hard on building a lot of back links to your website but here a few areas you must avoid

Link Farms: These are sites in a group that are set up for the sole purpose of generating back links to other sites in the group. These sites provide little or no useful content. They are a group of sites where each page has a link to every other page in the group. Obviously this is an attempt to spam the search engines for ranking. The search engines can easily identify link farms and will penalize your website for having an incoming link from a link farm

Banned pages: If a banned page has a back link to your website, the link can actually reduce your ranking with the search engines.

How do you find out if a website is banned by the search engines.

• If you look closely at the google page rank bar, these sites have an empty bar that is gray in colour. This is different from a page with a page rank of zero. [The page rank bar is white in this case]

• Also if you type the sites URL in the google search bar, google will return a sorry no information available message. This means the site is not indexed with Google. It does not necessarily mean that the site is a bad neighbourhood. Sites that are yet to be indexed in Google because they are new, also return this message.

Link pages: Link pages are pages on websites that contain all their out going links. You have seen them on a lot of sites. The are often called links pages or recommended links pages or links directory. Although linking from these web pages will not hurt you, they carry very little weight with regards to search engine ranking.

Non-relevant Sites: For your back links to your website to have a significant effect on your website ranking, your links should be from web pages that have content relevant to the content on your website. Linking from websites on niches that are not related to yours will not necessarily hurt you but it will not improve your rankings.

Hopefully this article has given you a few tips on linking strategies for your affiliate marketing sites

Affiliate Marketing Tips and Affiliate Marketing Guide at http://www.affiliatemarketingintro.com