Link farms – if your link is in what the search engines classify as a link farm then it could harm your ranking. A link farm is typically a site full of links, or a page with a high number of links on them. If the link farm is organised into categories with only a couple of dozen of relevant links per page, then it is less likely to harm your ranking.Irrelevant sites - if your website is focused on children then having link exchanges with pharmacy and gambling sites could well harm your rankings because they are not really relevant. Anchor text – the words that link from another site to yours are actually quite relevant to your search engine ranking.

When you are exchanging links with anyone, it is worth your while being discerning about the links. Yes, I know you want as many links as possible, but you should consider the relevancy of the links to your visitors, and also what your visitors would think of those links being on your site. If you had a site full of children’s games and educational material and then lots of links to adult related sites, how keen do you think parents would be for their children to visit your sites?Always check out if a site you are linking to has an affiliate program. If they do, then it is worth you signing up for it and putting the affiliate link on your site. Why? Because then when someone follows the link and buys, you get paid for it!