Back links are a great way to prove your site as an authority site and to boost your search engine rankings. But there are some things you shouldn’t do when it comes to back links

1. Babies Walk Before They Run – Most search engines aren’t dumb, at least the ones that count aren’t. If you have a site that is only a week old and it has 1,000 back links to it, the search engines are going to wave a red flag and say, “Just a minute, this shouldn’t be happening.” Your back links should grow naturally. This means that you won’t get 1,000 back links in just a couple of days. The main place this can really hurt you is if you are using article marketing. A lot of people are using submitters that will blast your article to 1,000 plus article directories overnight. Which on the face of it seems like a good thing but if you actually get published on all those directories in 24 hours you will be facing a possible worsening of your search engine ranking. If you are going to use a submitter try to find one that does the submission over a period of time so that you don’t get penalized for growing too fast. This really only applies to newer sites but even the older sites can be looked at if they have a 1000 time increase in their back links in a short period of time.

2. One Way is Better Then Round Trip – The main job of the search engine spiders is to find new pages, they do this by following the outbound links on your site. They don’t like it if the bounce back and forth and make no progress. This is what happens if you have too many reciprocal links on your site. Every time the spider leaves your site they are bounced back to your site by your partner’s link to you. This is something that is very easy for a spider to track and if it happens too much then you will be penalized for it. If you are working with reciprocal links limit them to one reciprocal link for every 3 outgoing links you have and boost the one way links to your site with submissions to directories and article submission.

3. Being Part of The Crowd Doesn’t Pay – There are a lot of link sites out there, some times called “link farms” that you can list you site on to get back link. Be part of this crowd too many times can actually hurt your ranking. There are a couple of reasons for this and part is that there are too many outbound links on the page and the second part is that there are too many different topics on the page. Having too many outbound links means that all the links will share any page rank the site might have this means you won’t get much. The best links come from the textual content of a page with your keywords as the anchor text (the words that create the link) and the page content being about or similar to your keywords. When you are on a link farm there is almost always a large number of topics on the page and you usually don’t get anchor text links.

4. Page Rank is Everything. NOT! – Everybody wants back links from sites with high page rank. This is actually good but if all your back links come from sites with the same type of page rank you will again get the search engines raising the red flag and looking at your site. The reason for this is there are places out there where you can buy one way links to your site. The search engines don’t like these services and if your site grows naturally you will never have all your back links coming from sites with a page rank of 5 or higher. Back links with a page rank of 1 will help your site, especially if you can get your keywords in the anchor text for the link. If you are running a back link campaign go after them all not just the high ranking sites. If you are purchasing back links make sure that they provide you with an assortment of sites with different page ranks and not just high ranking sites.

5. Variety is The Spice of Links – You have heard me say that you should you’re your keyword in the anchor text of your back link. This is very true but you shouldn’t have the same text in every back link or the same keyword in every back link. You should have a list of keywords for your site. Create a number of different links that use different text and different keywords in the anchor text. This will make your site rank higher on more keywords and it looks better to the search engines because people don’t phrase things the same way. If all the back links to your site are exactly the same then the search engines start grouping your links the same way they group duplicate content.

Remember back links are good but they can always be better. Remember the above to optimize your back link campaign.