This article is the third in a 6 part series.

While we all understand that the number of links pointing to your site boosts your ranking in the search engines, many fail to realize that the quality of the links is more important than the quantity.

Linking to a site Google considers spam can immediately cause your site to be banned.  If you are using the Google toolbar or an extension in Firefox that allows you to check your page’s Google ranking, a banned page would show up as not only zero page rank, but grey instead of white or green.

A banned page means you are getting zero traffic from Google.  Considering the fact that many sites get 80% of their traffic from a search engine, with Google being the largest referrer, the impact of Google’s traffic loss would be devastating to a business.

If a site looks and sounds sketchy, stay away.  Don’t participate in linking schemes or fraudulent automated systems to improve your page rank.  Blogsites rank very high in the search engines, very quickly.  The technology behind them is clean and efficient, allowing your content to shine.  There is no need for the underhanded techniques when your content draws the search engines so effectively.