Basically each time you link to an external site you are giving away some of your sites PR (page rank) as you are voting for that site by giving them a link.

If you spend a lot of time link building for your website or affiliate sites, you don’t want all your hard work to be for nothing, so here is what you need to do to ensure you are not giving away more that just a link.

An example hosting affiliate link

  <a href=”http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=hostingosc” target=”_blank”>Hosting</a>

An example of the same link but with NO FOLLOW

<a href=”http://secure.hostgator.com/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.cgi?id=hostingosc” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>Hosting</a>

When using the no follow tag rel=”nofollow” visitors will still go to the site and you will make your commission, however google will not count the link as an outbound link thus saving you sites precious pagerank.

Thats smart link thinking!

Well i wrote in my last post a couple of days ago about the different types of backlinks and how they will benefit you, but now here comes a few words of warning that may get you in to trouble with the big G (Google) in particular.

There is a lot of discussion about if backlinks can harm your site, i am of the belief that building backlinks too quickly can adversely affect your site, it may be something small where as the extra backlinks you are getting are just not counted or if you are going all out buying high PR backlinks or building 1,000 of backlinks using black hat method you could get your site penalised quite hard.

What could the result be? any number of things could happen to your site if you get links that are unnatural, Googles way of thinking is that a link should be natural and if you have good content on your site people will link to it naturally. therefore people going out buying paid links and using co-op programs may be in for a shock.

You could end up loosing all your sites PR (page rank), you may loose your search rankings and worst of all you may get you entire site black listed.

Think I’m joking? take a look at Googles link schemes page, and think twice before buying your next link.

Just remember good SERP’s take time, things will happen naturally and you cant cheat the big G.