SEO Facts and Tutoring examples
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3.2.6. Items that damage page rankings

Link Farms
Link farms worked great in the early days of search engines. It consists of group of websites that link to each other to earn “link popularity”, so back then when link popularity influenced the factors of SERPs rating greatly, link farms were really useful. Afterwards however, search engines countered this practice with filters. Thus, nowadays since there are many other factors more important than link popularity its not really useful and search engines also penalizes these websites.

FFA (Free-For-All) sites
This method not only doesn’t work, but it also hurt your ranking badly. The concept is simple, thousands of site owners submit their links to a FFA site where they get displayed on a page. However as the number of sites displayed is limited and they get replaced progressively as new links are submitted. So these links not only aren’t displayed long enough, but search engines also don like these links.

Also you will only get traffic made of other web owners that submitted links on the FFA sites and you will most probably be spammed with e-mails. Is being displayed for 5mins on a site search don’t like worth all that??

Forum/Blog/E-mail Spam
No matter in what form, spam IS spam. One of the most important rules of “whitehat” SEO is that you shouldn’t use spam.
Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t use spam:

1. Spam simply bothers forums/blogs readers own owners.
   
2. You may get signaled to anti-spam organisations.
   
3. You will need abuse-proof hosting, abuse-proof domain registrar and an abuse-proof payment processor.
   
4. You wont get significant link juice from sites where you can spam as they will be low quality websites. And as for high quality websites the will be moderated to filter spam comments and may even have nofollow link codes. Also is immoral and bad. So don’t spam or we’ll tell Santa!

Paid links
Paid links are hard to categorize. They can be useful, hurtful or simply have no effect on your SEO. We don’t recommend buying links as the go against the whole concept of SEO that gets you visitors that visited your with a genuine interest in the contents. Pain links instead get you visitors that are paid to get on your site. If Google finds out that you prefer paid links to normal ones, you will be greatly penalized.

Despite all this, paid links can useful in some ways. They can be used as advertising for your website even though following Google paid links guidelines they would have to be no follow links. Since you wont be getting any link juice from it, at least try to choose paid links that are related to your site so you get quality traffic that are related to your site. Also check their trust rating and don’t hesitate to contact them if you have doubts.

Inappropriate neighbors
Inappropriate neighbors refers to questionable websites such as sites with reference to hack, porn, malware , fishing, etc.. So basically:

1. Try to avoid having backlinks on these categories of websites as it will have a negative effect on your trust rating..
   
2. Don’t allow any links pointing to them on your pages as it will simply hurt your ranking.

Unrelated websites
It doesn’t hurt your ranking as bad as the others but it can still bring it down. As we said earlier its better to place your links on relevant websites and also place links pointing to relevant websites on your own pages. At least make sure that their theme is related to yours. For instance, if your site is about mp3 music, post links on another mp3 website or an mp3 player retailers company’s website. If the themes differ too much, the link is filtered out, and its value reduced. So in short, a link on a relevant website is worth more than 5 links on an unrelated site.

3.D.7. Off site ranking tools
Here is a short overview of what we talked about in this section:

1. Place backlinks on websites with relevant themes, high trust rating and high PageRank.
   
2. Don’t underestimate the value of keywords in and around your backlinks’ anchor text.
   
3. Choose the landing page your backlinks point to according to its keywords.
   
4. Don’t put too much effort into reciprocal linking, it wont work wonders as many will assume.
   
5. Articles submission are useless to SEO.
   
6. Don’t spam!
   
7. Choose related paid links with no follow codes to avoid penalty.
   
8. Filter your neighborhood.