Link Exchanges

While links are important to your site's ranking in search results, you want to be careful not to collect ingoing links too earnestly. You especially want to avoid link exchanges and link farms, because participating in these SEO tricks can hurt your site's ranking.

A link exchange is a program in which one site offers to link to another site in return for a reciprocal link. The sole purpose of link exchanges is to try to boost search result rankings, which means that links may be placed on pages whether or not the link benefits users. But search engines don't like optimization techniques that don't benefit users. If you create pages that are great for your users, other webmasters will hear about your pages and want to link them. That's all you need to do.

Link Farms

A link farm is "a large group of web pages created with the intention of creating hyperlinks to one another" (from Wikipedia). Like link exchanges, link farms are designed not to benefit users but to try to trick search engines. Search engines are programmed to recognize link farms and usually penalize their search rankings. If your site participates in a link farm, it may be penalized, too.

Free For All Pages

A Free For All (FFA) page is a type of link farm. It is a single page with a collection of links designed to boost search rankings. There are several negatives to participating in FFAs:

• Because there is no relevance between the content of your site and the "content" of the FFA page, search engines do not give any importance to links from FFA pages.
• Links on FFA pages are temporary, as links are replaced continually by new links.
• FFA pages collect your email address when you submit your site to them, which means you'll be getting even more spam each day.