Originally posted by paul144:
On another point...
Be very, very careful when hiring anyone who promises to improve your placement on the major search engines. We used one a couple of years ago that used "link farms". Our ranking on MSN, Yahoo, etc.. went way up. Google decided it was "illegal" under their policies and removed us completely from their searches. You could type in our URL into a google search and it would not find us. It took us months to get our google placement back up after that fiasco.
The company that we paid $3000 to do this insisted that they did nothing wrong as our placement was still high on the other search engines, thus fulfilling their obligation. I figure it cost us about 15% of our business for several months.
Good point! I have had to pull a few clients off of the black list from Google... due to link farming schemes... I will also point out that submission services are a waste of time, and can possibly get you put on a naughty list! Reason being, link submissions have not been necessary for a few years now. The robots read this forum, if you have a link in your sig to your site... they will follow it to your site and index you.
By submitting your site through site submission services you stand the chance to have Google pull your site because your linked up with a link farm.
Also to answer the original question, are there any links that you shouldn't use?
Yes, don't link to a link farm, this will hurt your standings! Also try to stay away from link exchanges that have 35+ links per page. I stick to 30 or less links per page on sites I trade links with.
And Roland has a very valid point about linking to PR 0 - 3 sites... you never know what they will become
Also make sure that you have all of your directory submissions done! These IMO are very important because they are all IBL's *In Bound Links* and count higher in the algorithm than reciprocal links
NeO
