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SEO News recently published an article by Donald Nelson, enumerating 10 top no-no’s in search engine optimization. Pretty basic stuff, but the last item was interesting and worth sharing, especially since some SEO’s – particularly those who are overeager to build links — still don’t know about it. Here’s an excerpt:

You can’t get into trouble if a questionable or substandard site links to you, but according to Google, you can be penalized if you link to what they call bad neighborhoods. These are spam sites or other sites that have a bad reputation. So, don’t accept offers to link with any and all websites. Visit the proposed link partner and see if the site is ranked, as opposed to being banned, and if there are any other issues that might make it questionable. If you have doubt, then don’t.

Many of our clients come to us requesting that we build links for them. This is never an easy job – in fact, it’s one of the most time-consuming part of SEO, next only to content creation. It would be easy to fish for incoming links from low-quality websites, but of course we know better than to identify our client’s websites to bad neighborhoods. Thankfully, our Search Exchange system was already up and running by the time “linking” became the name of the game. The system lets us build better incoming and outgoing link systems for our paying clients, whose websites have seen phenomenal Page Rank improvements a few months after signing up. On top of that, we have launched Free Relevant Links, which enables us to give free, top-quality linking service to SEOs on a budget. We get hundreds of sign ups every month, and those free accounts felt drastic improvements not just in Page Rank, but also in traffic.

We’re really proud of this service, and would like to share it. If you want to see how Free Relevant Links works, just read this. It’s so easy to sign up, manage, and maintain your links. Unlike spammy free link networks that give you links from random websites that only hurt your ranking instead of improve it, Free Relevant Links only links you up with websites in your category. Every link is top-quality. Best of all, we give you complete freedom to choose what websites you want to link to.

Sign up here.