As we’ve mentioned before in previous articles, links are a positive signal to search engines affirming the value and validity of your website.  By this logic, the more websites linking to you the better your page rank, right? Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple. In the early days of search engines, yes, it was that simple. Early search engines only assigned value based on quantity. They possessed no ability to ascertain quality or origin of external links. Webmasters constructed entire networks of interlinked pages designed to boost the ranking of specific websites and this still happens today! Their overall impact is, however, diminishing. This and other tactics intended to fool search engines and boost page rank are considers “black hat” strategies. After all, how does a web crawler definitively ascertain the value of the originating site? Only the people behind the search engines know. Suffice to say that as search engines and their crawlers evolve, so does their criteria for evaluating the origin of the website hosting your link. As you attempt to gain stature in the eyes of the search engines, be wary of engaging in the following practices; the short term gain isn’t worth the monetary loss and long-term [....] Read More >>