If there was a way to get that PR 5 website or blog to provide a link back to your new website, Not only could it drive quality traffic to your site, but it would also provide a great back link for the search engines to find. But, unless your website is truly unique, it is unlikely that a big website will be eager to just give you a link on their main page. Their site space is just too valuable to give free links that provide little return or benefit for them.

The appeal for new website or blog owners to get back links by any means to increase their P.R can be a powerful motivator, but I can’t stress enough that caution is advisable in this practice.  In general, Google and other search engines allow websites with more links to them from other sites to appear higher in search results, considering each link as a referral for the site it links to.

Backlinks Main Benefits
The Main benefits of back links are directly related to SEO which improves your PR immensely; these changes in your popularity can be surprisingly fast. Herein lies one of the indicators that flag up on the search engines radar and draws attention. So picture the scenario; you’re a new website or blog and all of a sudden your site shows up multiple times for back links, naturally the search engines are going to be suspicious and investigate. If they find that your links have been purchased or have been produced through black hat methods, then your site will suffer appropriately and can be banned all together.
The search engines are very clever with new algorithms crawling the web to detect unfair or blackhat practices. That being said it’s not impossible; If you do purchase backlinks then it is advisable to slowly incorporate these links in a more organic way.

No Follow Rule
Google believes that a link which has been purchased or exchanged in a reciprocal manner should not benefit websites’ ranking in search results. Thus its “nofollow” rule calls on all website owners to use the “nofollow” tag when creating such links. Any website which doesn’t use the tag for a link of this type may be penalized. Some have speculated that the recent reductions in PageRank values for many websites were caused by violations of this rule.                    “Kind of defeats the purpose eh!”

Read This excellent article from SEO White Hats

The major search engine Google has a rule regarding use of the rel=”nofollow” tag/attribute in links, which has generated some controversy in recent months. The rule is intended to prevent websites from gaining better Google search result rankings by participating in link exchanges or sales. This is becoming more relevant in the recent weeks as Google recently performed an internet wide update of Page Rank (PR) and many leading directories and sites that participate in paid link advertising seem to be singled out by Google.

Excepting Third Party Ads
To keep Google happy they suggest adding the “no follow” attribute to all outbound paid/ad links. All the search engines (Yahoo, MSN) also encourage use of this attribute.  Checkout the WikiMedia description of No Follow Attribute.
I agree some nofollow paid links are fine as long as they are not “black listed” by google for being unreptuable. The easist thing to do is to check the website you will be linking to for 2 main things -

1. What is their page rank? If they are above 4, they are most likely quite reputable.

2. Do a search for” [advertiser name] google black list” or words to that effect and if your search returns information suggesting that the advertiser is not legit than be wary about promoting their links.

Alternatively, I have seen some sites that state upfront they are money making sites (a lot of MMO blogs fall in this category) and so they don’t really care about page rank and the whole nofollow is a non-issue.
The Big G is able to pick these up quite easily through all its bots. Actually, there are 100’s of programs available online that can break down all your link details including all the related attributes.
Generate your own Backlinks

It’s not that hard to generate hundreds if not thousands of one way links to your site; all you need is an appetite to write great articles. So then start submitting to multiple directories and watch your PR go up.   Google Search for Article Directories

So the message is tread with caution and do your research; Please feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks’ for reading

Related:Taming The Beast

Some web site owners are very hesitant to publish links to other sites from their own - and they might be doing themselves a disservice.

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