Everyone that has an active website tends to get spam from other webmasters that want to trade links with you. This is especially prolific in the real estate industry as there are a plethora of individual real estate websites. Here is one email I just received recently:

Hi there,

My name is The Universal Hosting and I am the owner of http://www.theuniversalhosting.com.
We are very interested in exchanging links with your website at http://www.Hismove.com. Exchanging links will increase search engine rankings and website popularity.

If you are interested in exchanging links, please add the following details to your website and click the approve link below:

and it goes on…

This one was obviously automatically generated by special link building software. Besides being very annoying, the following link practices will actually lower your Search Engine Ranking and maybe even get you banned from the serps (search engine results page). This has been very well documented over the last year or so… but just in case you are new to web or SEO (search engine Optimization), let me explain why this is the case.

As a general rule, one of the primary factors that SE’s (search engines) use to rate websites has to do with incoming links. Back in the late 90’s, before the SE’s got any wiser, building up thousands of links through link farming and reciprocal linking was the best and fastest way to get better results in the SE results. Not anymore. Search engines now focus more on what they call link relevancy. This means that if you have a real estate site, and you go out and get thousands of links from a gambling related site, it will have no effect on your search engine ranking, and may even be detrimental to your ranking. They also pay attention to the quality of the links coming to your site.

Here are some tips to healthy website linking:

1. Do not subscribe to a service that promises to get you thousands of links in a short period of time. Otherwise known as link farms.
2. Do not participate in reciprocal linking. Similar to what the person in the email example was trying to do.
3. Do not place hidden or invisible text on your website with links to your primary URL.
4. I know it’s tempting, but it’s better if you don’t purchase links from a link broker. The SE’s frown on it, and if they find out, you could be in trouble.
5. Try not to add too many incoming links at one time. “unnatural” linking could get you banned. The SE’s want to see a slow steady build up of quality links.
6. Do your best to get links from domains that end in .edu, .gov, etc. Submit your site to DMOZ.org… or better yet, sign up to be an editor for one of their categories that could include your website.
7. Always follow the 10 Linking Commandments hehe…
   
8. Try to get incoming links from pages that have a high Google page rank
9. whenever you can, place you top keywords in the anchor text of the link itself
10. whenever you can, try to make sure the title of the page you are linking from has your keywords in it.
11. Try to only get links from sites that are relevant to your own.
12. Use a service like Market Leap to check your incoming link periodically.

Hope those are helpful….

If you want to read more, here is a great link that gives very thorough detail on various linking strategies.

Related posts:

• Follow-Up Post on Building Incoming Links to Your Site
• SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #15
• R.I.P. - Reciprocal Linking - Deceased 1999-2006
• SEO Quick Tip of the Day —> #12
• What is Page Rank, and Will it Effect My Website Ranking?