Links can Destroy your Page Ranks. I know you don’t believe that, as most SEO Guru says, “90% of SEO is about Links”. It is true, but you have to very careful with links, as Search Engine may penalize you for bad links.

Following are five Linking techniques, that should be avoided strictly.

1. Link Farms:

Just Stay away from Link Farms. Don’t have any link To or From Link Farms, as rather than increasing your rank, it can destroy your existing rank. Google refers these sites as “bad neighborhoods” and if you link to them, you will end up with a lower Page Rank.  Must choose linking sites carefully. If you suspect that a site you want to link to is a “bad neighborhood”, check their PageRank and see if they commit any Black-Hat SEO Techniques, or you think they might, then you shouldn’t link to them. Remember, you are known from your Company. So if you have Bad sites linking you, you are bad too.  

2. Link Pages:

Google value links that are in context and appear related to the page as a whole. Unrelated links, lot of reciprocals, and paid links are penalized. Let me share my own experience with you.

I had a 5 years old website, which was ranking 4 on Google without any known SEO effort. There were only good contents (written for visitors), as I had no idea at that time about SEO, reasonably written Titles and Descriptions. When I heard about SEO, I just started reading articles and starting doing myself without proper training and proper home work. I read some where, about the importance of Links, and I found sites that facilitate you to exchange links. Created a link Page and started exchanging links. In few months, my page Rank was down to 3.  

Reasons:

1. Google Hate Reciprocal links. And make its algorithm intelligent enough to find such linking strategy. And when they found huge number of such reciprocals, they penalize you.
2. Often when you are exchanging links, you don’t care about other site’s rank and it can be a Bad neighbor or site not related to you.

3. Repeated Links:

Don’t link to and from the same site repeatedly. This is also called link spamming. Google will look at the links you have on your page, and only count the one or two towards optimization. If they found so many same links, your site might appear to be a spammer, even if you’re not linking to a “bad neighborhood” or are in a cross-linking scheme. You need to avoid “looks like a spammer”, even if you are not a spammer.

4. Link Circles or Cross Linking:

Google give priority for links, and reward “honest” links, or links that are not paid for. When several sites have links set up in a circular (or more complex) pattern (site A links to site B links to site C links to site A), it can look like you’re paying for links. Don’t assume that because your average customer won’t notice the pattern, the search engine won’t either. If it looks like you might have paid for the links (even if you haven’t) your ranking could be penalized. Remember, “Notorious is bad then bad.”

5. Meta refresh tag to redirect users

Don’t use Meta Refresh tag to redirect your site, as this technique is widely used as Black-Hat SEO technique. Many spammers use them to try and fool search engines into thinking that a page is about one thing, and then refreshing to something completely different. Meta refresh also doesn’t give information to the search engine about why the redirect is occurring. It’s much better to set up a permanent HTTP 301 redirect when you need to redirect your customers to a new URL.

 What is Mets Refresh: Meta refresh is a method of instructing a web browser to automatically refresh the current web page after a given time interval, using an HTML meta element with the http-equiv parameter set to “refresh” and a content parameter giving the time interval in seconds. It is also possible to instruct the browser to fetch a different URL when the page is refreshed, by including the alternative URL in the content parameter. By setting the refresh time interval to zero (or a very low value), this allows meta refresh to be used as a method of URL redirection.

Article Source: http://www.wisdomtalks.com/linking-for-seo-five-donts/