4.5 Quality of links

As I already said, with links sites kind of vote for each other, and some "votes" are more trusted by Search Engines than others. This is what we call different link quality.

Like, when you ask for advice on to which nursery to take your kid, you′ll better trust Maggie who′s got three kids of her own, rather than Charles, who′s a bachelor of 47 years, never had children and only heard about nurseries from his friends.

So here′s my off–page optimization advice #1:

Always think of the quality of links you′re getting.

And I′ll give you tips that′ll help you get only premium quality links.

4.6 Link farms and FFA sites

There′re hundreds of such websites that promise you SEO wonders, but I′ll tell you how it all works.

FFA (Free For All) sites and link farms are pretty much alike: FFAs are special sites where anyone can drop a link — and a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. You can be tempted by a promise of "10,000 FFA links" and you may even really get these 10,000 links, hoping that your site will look very "popular". But instead, you get nothing but bad neighborhood and, most probably, penalization.

Google often acts like a human being: it′ll think if you "hang out" with these "bad guys", you′re pretty much the same. The quality of links you can get at link farms is most often so bad that Search Engines may stop trusting you and even kick you out of their indexes due to membership in a link farm.

Therefore, stay away from FFAs and link farms and try to build good quality links — and build them at the right pace. Sure, it takes longer to get a high quality link, but the results are worth the effort.

In the next chapter I′ll tell you how quality links are built. And right now, I′ll let you know, what a good link is made of.

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