The Authorize.Net DPM Payment Gateway handles all the steps in the secure transaction while remaining virtually transparent, thus simplifying PCI compliance.

1. Customer data is protected with 128-bit SSL encryption.
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A payment form to your checkout process pay page which is posted directly to secure Authorize.net servers – because of this no SSL certificate is required on your site, and complex PCI requirements are avoided:

Authorize.Net understands the evolving needs of Internet merchants and their solutions are designed to help you grow your online business.

• Accept a Variety of Payments – Accept All major credit cards easily.
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• Risk Management – Sensitive data is stored in the Authorize.Net PCI-compliant data center, never on your computer.
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• Free Help – Authorize.Net provides live technical and account support to merchants, as well as access to online documentation and user guides.

About Livedrive

Livedrive is creating cloud storage technology that will revolutionise the way people access their files, photos, music, videos and other digital content. Our vision is simple: don’t store files on your PC, store them on your Livedrive instead. Livedrive is your personal storage space on the Internet. It’s unlimited, it’s secure and it’s there forever. See more about Livedrive’s products.

Livedrive was first launched in December 2008, and has grown exponentially since then, becoming one of the worlds leading cloud storage companies. We now have over 500,000 paying customers around the world, and have won awards such as the Computer Active Best Online Backup Buy It award, and the Web User Gold Award. See what the press are saying about Livedrive.

Livedrive have significant partnerships around the globe with some of the world’s leading retailers. We provide online backup services to PC World, Currys and Dixons in the UK – which are sold under their KNOWHOW™ brand – and to CompUSA and TigerDirect in the USA. Our retail partnerships are bringing simple yet powerful cloud storage and online backup to the mass market in the way that no-one else has done before. Find out more about partner retail opportunities.

Livedrive also provide a popular reseller package for web designers, system integrators and entrepreneurs. As a member of the Livedrive reseller programme, you can start selling online backup, remote access and cloud storage to your customers instantly. Find out more about the Livedrive reseller package.

The Livedrive management team is made up of respected industry experts and investors, who have lent their significant experience and financial strength to ensuring that Livedrive is both well-managed and well-funded. Find out more about Livedrive’s management team.

JustCloud provides automatic, cloud storage, fille syncing and file sharing. Combining both cloud storage and file syncing makes our technology at the cutting edge of the industry.

It will be an exaggeration to say that the SEO industry doesn’t feel the recession. This is not exactly so but when compared to industries such as automobiles, newspapers, banking, real estate, etc., SEO looks like a coveted island of financial security. This doesn’t mean that there is no drop in volumes and everybody in SEO is working for top dollar but as a whole the SEO industry and the separate individuals, who make their living in SEO, are much better than many other employees and entrepreneurs.

What Can You Expect from Your SEO Career During a Recession?

The question about what realistic expectations are is fundamental. I bet there are people in SEO, who are not very happy with their current situation and blame the recession for that. Well, if most of your clients were from troubled industries (cars, real estate, financial services, etc.), then you do have a reason to complain. In such cases you should be happy if you can pay the bills. What you can do (if you haven’t already done it) is to look for new customers from other industries.

Another factor that influences your expectations about your SEO career during the recession is your position on the career ladder. It makes a big difference if you work for a company or you are your own boss. Being an employee has always been a more vulnerable position, so if you expect job security, this is easier to achieve when you ares an independent SEO contractor. Mass layoffs might not the common for SEO companies but hired workers are never immune against it.

Additionally, your skill level also affects how your SEO carer will be influenced by the recession. The recession is not the right time for novices to enter SEO. Many people from other industries rush to SEO as a life belt. When these people don’t have the right skills and expertise but expect rivers of gold, this inevitably leads to disappointment.

What Makes SEO Careers Recession-Proof?

So, if you are a seasoned SEO practitioner and you don’t dream of rivers of gold, you can feel safe with SEO because unlike careers in many other industries SEO careers are relatively recession-proof. Here are some of the reasons why SEO careers are recession-proof:

• The SEO market is an established market. If you remember the previous recession from the beginning of the century, when the IT industry was among the most heavily stricken, you might be skeptical a bit that now it won’t be the same story. No, it is not the same now. SEO is not a new service anymore and the SEO market itself is more established than it was a couple of years ago. This is what makes the present recession different from the previous one – the difference is fundamental and it can’t be neglected.
• SEO is one of the last expenses companies cut. SEO has already become a necessity for companies of any size. Unlike hardware, cars, not to mention entertainment and even business trips, SEO expenses are usually not that big but they help a company to stay aboard. That is why when a company decides to make cuts in the budget, SEO expenses are usually not among the things that get the largest cut (or any cut at all).
• SEO has great ROI. The Return On Investment (ROI) for money spent on SEO is much higher than the ROI for other types of investments. SEO brings companies money and this is what makes it such a great investment. Stop SEO and the money stops coming as well.
• Many clients start aggressive SEO campaigns in an attempt to get better results fast. During a recession SEO is even more important. That is why many clients decide that an aggressive SEO campaign will help them get more clients and as a result these clients double their pre-recession budgets.
• SEO is cheaper than PPC. SEO is just one of the many ways for a site to get traffic. However, it is also one of the most effective ways to drive tons of traffic. For instance, if you consider PPC, the cost advantages of SEO are obvious. PPC is very expensive and as a rule, ranking high in organic search results even for competitive keywords is cheaper than PPC.
• Cheaper than traditional promotion methods. Traditional promotion methods (i.e. offline marketing) are still an option but their costs are higher even than PPC and the other forms of online promotion. Besides many companies have given offline marketing completely and have turned to SEO as their major way to promote their business and attract new clients.
• SEO is an recurring expense. Many businesses build their business model around memberships and other forms of recurring payments. For you memberships and other types of recurring payments are presold campaigns – i.e. more or less you know that if the client is happy with a campaign you did for him, he or she will return. Acquiring recurring clients is very beneficial because you have less expenses in comparison to acquiring clients one by one.

The outlook for SEO careers during times of recession is pretty positive. As we already mentioned, it is possible to experience drops in volumes or some of your clients to go the bankruptcy road but as a whole SEO offers more stability than many other careers. If you manage to take advantage of the above mentioned recession-proof specifics of SEO and you are a real professional, you won’t have the pleasure to feel the recession in all its bitterness.

What’s New in HTML 5?

HTML 5 follows the way the Net evolved in the last years and includes many useful tags and elements. At first glance, it might look as if HTML 5 is going in the direction of a programming language (i.e. PHP) but actually this is not so – it is still an XML-based presentation language. The new tags and elements might make HTML 5 look more complex but this is only at first glance.

HTML 5 is not very different from HTML 4. One of the basic ideas in the development of HTML 5 was to ensure backward compatibility and because of that HTML 5 is not a complete revamp of the HTML specification. So, if you had worries that you will have to start learning it from scratch, these worries are groundless.

How the Changes in HTML 5 Will Affect SEO?

As a SEO expert, you are most likely interested mainly in those changes in the HTML 5 specification, which will affect your work. Here are some of them:

• Improved page segmentation. Search engines are getting smarter and there are many reasons to believe that even now they are applying page segmentation. Basically, page segmentation means that a page is divided into several separate parts (i.e. main content, menus, headers, footers, links sections, etc.) and these parts are treated as separate entries. At present, there is no way for a Web master to tell search engines how to segment a page but this is bound to change in HTML 5.
• A new <article> tag. The new <article> tag is probably the best addition from a SEO point of view. The <article> tag allows to mark separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine. It is expected that when articles are marked with the <article> tag, this will make the HTML code cleaner because it will reduce the need to use <div> tags. Also, probably search engines will put more weight on the text inside the <article> tag as compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.
• A new <section> tag. The new <section> tag can be used to identify separate sections on a page, chapter, book. The advantage is that each section can have its separate HTML heading. As with the <article> tag, it can be presumed that search engines will pay more attention to the contents of separate sections. For instance, if the words of a search string are found in one section, this implies higher relevance as compared to when these words are found all across the page or in separate sections.
• A new <header> tag. The new <header> tag (which is different from the head element) is a blessing for SEO experts because it gives a lot of flexibility. The <header> tag is very similar to the <H1> tag but the difference is that it can contain a lot of stuff, such as H1, H2, H3 elements, whole paragraphs of text, hard-coded links (and this is really precious for SEO), and any other kind of info you feel relevant to include.
• A new <footer> tag. The <footer> tag might not be as useful as the <header> one but still it allows to include important information there and it can be used for SEO purposes as well. The <header> and <footer> tags can be used many times on one page – i.e. you can have a separate header/footer for each section and this gives really a lot of flexibility.
• A new <nav> tag. Navigation is one of the important factors for SEO and everything that eases navigation is welcome. The new <nav> tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages.

As you see, the new tags follow the common structure of a standard page and each of the parts (i.e. header, footer, main section) has a separate tag. The tags we described here, are just some (but certainly not all) of the new tags in HTML 5, which will affect SEO in some way. For instance, <audio>, <video> or <dialogue> tags are also part of the HTML 5 standard and they will allow to further separate the content into the adequate categories. There are many other tags but they are of relatively lower importance and that is why they are not discussed.

For now HTML 5 is still far in the future. When more pages become HTML 5-compliant, search engines will pay more attention to HTML 5. Only then it will be possible to know how exactly search engines will treat HTML 5 pages. The mass adoption of HTML 5 won’t happen soon and it is a safe bet to say that for now you can keep to HTML 4 and have no concerns. Additionally, it will take some time for browsers to adjust to HTML 5, which further delays the moment when HTML 5 will be everywhere.

However, once HTML 5 is accepted and put to use, it will be the dominating standard for the years to come and that is why you might want to keep an eye on what other web masters are doing, just to make sure that you will not miss the moment when HTML 5 becomes the defacto standard.

Twitter is simple to use and this is what made it so popular. Twitter is fashionable right now, so enjoy the moment. Even the creators of Twitter admit that as with MySpace and other Web 2.0 sensations, Twitter will inevitably go out of fashion some day, so hurry up and get some traffic for free now, when it is still all the rage of the season.

Twitter is simple to use, yet it is really powerful. You might need a couple of hours to get familiar with the basic functionality of Twitter and of some of the extras it has but you can harness its power, even if you don’t know it very well.

Unlike most of the other places you can get traffic for free, Twitter is a microblogging platform, which means that there are restrictions on the number of characters in a message. Therefore, you need to be concise in your Tweets and use your space wisely. In addition to being concise, here are some more tips to help you get traffic from Twitter:

1Make your Twitter profile interesting

Your profile and your username are the first two things your visitors will see when they go to your Twitter page. If your profile looks boring, people won’t bother to read your tweets, not to mention visit the links you post in them. You can’t write a very long bio of yours, but you can enter a few words about you – i.e. your occupation, your interests, etc. You can also include a couple of keywords in your bio.

2 Pick a niche-targeted username

Your username is also very important. You need to pick a username that is targeted at your niche. For instance, if you are promoting your SEO services and want to drive traffic to your SEO site, you can choose something like SEOmaster, SEOguru, SEOservices, etc. Your username will show in searches other users make and this is why you must pay attention to what you choose.

3 Put your site/blog URL in your profile

According to some statistics, 80% of tweeters don’t provide an URL in their bio! Well, maybe these people are not SEO experts/Internet marketers and they don’t need this traffic but you as a SEO expert can’t afford to miss it. So, don’t forget to include your URL in your profile!

4 Send the link to your profile to your friends, coworkers, and acquaintances

Your friends, coworkers, and acquaintances will be your most loyal audience, so if they don’t know about your Twitter page, make them aware of what they are missing. If you have their emails, or know their accounts on other networks, you can send a mass invite.

5Search for Twitter users with similar interests

You might have millions of friends, but more followers are always welcome. That is why you can use the search functions on Twitter and find people with similar interests. Find as many as you can and invite them all. These people might not be as loyal as your friends, coworkers, and acquaintances but still you will get hits from them as well. Some Twitter users report that about 1-2% of their followers visit their site a day, which means that if you have 1,000 followers, you might expect to get at least 10 or 20 visits a day to your site. This response rate might seem low but there are ways to increase it.

6 Socialize on Twitter as much as you can

When you are active in Twitter, respond to the posts of your followers and visit their links, this seriously increases your chances that you will get the same in return. In a word, actively follow those that follow you.

7 Tweet regularly

As with all other kinds of media, if you want to keep your audience, you need to feed it regularly. Writing a short tweet takes just seconds, but it is enough in order to keep your followers happy. It goes without saying, that you should tweet about useful things, so if you don’t have something meaningful to post about you or your sites, it is quite OK to post a link to an article, a video, a blog, etc. you found on the Net and you like.

7Don’t spam

You might feel that every single user on Twitter is interested in you and your blog/site but this is not exactly so. You might be tempted to make as many users as you can aware of your Twitter page and your latest tweets but you’d better refrain from doing this, unless you want to see if you can get a ban or not.

8Take advantage of Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is one more useful service you can take advantage of in order to increase your reach. Go to twitterfeed.com and configure your feeds.

9Make Twitter Search love you

Twitter has a great search function and its main advantage is that it offers real-time results. Google might be fast in indexing pages but its indexing is not real-time. Users are hungry for hot news and nothing beats a real-time search. Many bloggers report that they are getting more traffic from Twitter than from Google and partially this is due to the fact that their tweets are popular and users find them with ease.

10Add Twitter gadgets to your site

There are tons of Twitter gadgets and new ones are being released every day. The cool thing about Twitter gadgets is that your blog visitors can become your Twitter followers. If your Twitter followers have many followers, chances are that some of these followers will notice you and will join your network. As we already mentioned, building a large and targeted network is key to getting more Twitter traffic to your site.

These are some of the main ways in which you can get traffic from Twitter. If you are creative and if you monitor what’s going on on Twitter and what new Twitter gadgets are released, you will certainly find more ways to drive traffic from Twitter to your site.

Like Twitter, Facebook is just one of the many ways to get some traffic to your site. Many marketers believe that it is just a matter of time for the traffic from Facebook, Twitter and the other major social networking sites to surpass the traffic their sites get from Google.

While this time might come, don’t take this as a promise that even if you do everything right, Facebook, Twitter, or any other similar site will do traffic miracles for you. For some people Facebook works like a charm, for others it doesn’t work at all. The same applies to Twitter. You can’t know in advance if Facebook and/or Twitter will crash your server with traffic. Just try both and see which one (if any) works for you.

Unlike Twitter, which is very simplistic, Facebook offers more possibilities. Yes, you might need more time in order to explore all the possibilities and take advantage of them but hopefully these efforts will have a great return in terms of traffic. Here are some tips that can help you turn Facebook into a traffic monster:

1 Your profile is your major weapon

As with Twitter and any other social network, if you don’t make your profile interesting, you will hardly become popular. Give enough background information for you and don’t forget to make your profile public because this way even people, who don’t know you, when they encounter your profile, they might become interested in you and become a supporter of yours.

2Include information about your site on your Wall and in the photo gallery

Facebook gives you the opportunity to write a lot about you and your endeavors, as well as to include pictures, so use all these opportunities to build interest in you and your products. It is even better to post videos and fill in the other tabs, so if you have something meaningful to put there, just do it.

3Build your network

As with other social networking sites, your network is your major capital. That is why you need to invite your friends, acquaintances, and partners and ask them to join as your supporter. You should also search for people with interests similar to yours. However, don’t be pushy and don’t spam because this is not the way to convince people to join your network.

4Post regularly

No matter how interesting the stuff in your Facebook profile is, if you don’t publish new content regularly, the traffic to your Facebook profile (and respectively the Facebook traffic to your site) will slow down. If you can post daily, it is fine but even if you don’t post that regularly, try to do it as frequently as you can. If nothing else, updating your status regularly is more than nothing, so do it.

5Be active

A great profile, an impressive network, and posting regularly are just a part of the recipe for success on Facebook. You also need to be active – visit the profiles of your supporters, take part in their groups and other initiatives, visit their sites. You are right that all this takes a lot of time and you might soon discover that Facebooking is a full-time occupation but if you notice an increase in traffic to your site, then all this is worth.

6Arrange your page

Unlike other social networks, Facebook gives you more flexibility and you can move around many of the boxes. If you put the RSS feed with the links to your blog in a visible space, this alone can generate lots of traffic for you.

7Check what Facebook apps are available

Facebook apps are numerous and new and new ones are released all the time. While many of these apps are not exactly what you need, there are apps, which can work for you in a great way. For instance, MarketPlace widget/plugin or Blog Friends widget are very useful and you should take advantage of them. You can also use the widgets for crossposting (i.e. posting directly on Twitter from Facebook) because this saves you time.

8Use Facebook Social Ads

If you can’t get traffic the natural way, you might consider using Facebook Social ads. These are PPC ads and starting a campaign is similar to an Adwords campaign.

9Start a group

There are many groups on Facebook but it is quite probable that there is a free niche for you. Start a group about something related to your business and invite people to join it. The advantage of this approach is that you are getting targeted users – i.e. people, who are interested in you, your product, your ideas, etc.

10 Write your own Facebook extensions

While this step is certainly not for everybody, if you can write Facebook extensions, this is one more way to make your Facebook profile popular and get some traffic to your site.

11Use separate profiles

Unfortunately, social networks do expose a lot of personal information and you are not paranoid, if you don’t want so much publicity. Many people are rightfully worried about their privacy on social network sites and that is why it is not uncommon to have one personal profile for friends and one business profile to promote their business. You can have one single profile for both purposes, but if you have privacy concerns, consider separating this profile in two – you’d better be safe than sorry.

Facebook is changing all the time and no matter how hard you try to follow these changes, there will be new and new possibilities for you to explore. That is why it is not possible to compile a complete list of all the tactics you can use in order to drive traffic from Facebook to your site. Anyway, if you try just the basics for Facebook success we listed here, chances are that you will see a considerable traffic increase.

1Optimize your site for search engines.

Search engines have always been a major way to get traffic for free. That is why you need to do your homework and optimize your site so that it ranks well for the keywords you target. SEO is still the most powerful way to get traffic for free and you really need to invest some time and efforts in the optimization of your site. SEO is not that difficult and if you want to get familiar with it in a nutshell, check our SEO Tutorial. If you are too busy for that, you can start with the 15 Minute SEO article.  

2Frequently update the contents of your site. .

If you expected some shocking secrets revealed, you might be a bit disappointed. One of the first steps in getting traffic for free is trivial but vital – get great content and frequently update it. In terms of SEO, content is king. If your content is good and frequently updated you will not only build a loyal audience of recurring visitors, who will often come to see what is new, but search engines will also love your site.

3Take advantage of social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking sites (especially the most popular among them) are another powerful way to get traffic for free. If you want to learn how to do it, check the How to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking sites article, where we have explained what to do if you want to get free traffic from sites such as Digg, Delicious, etc.

4Use your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Social networks are also a way to get traffic for free. If you are popular on networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, the traffic you get from there can easily surpass the traffic from Google and the other search engines. It is true that building a large network of targeted followers on Twitter and supporters on Facebook takes a lot of time and effort but generally the result is worth.

5Get links with other sites in your niche.

Another way to get traffic for free is from other sites in your niche. Getting links with other sites in your niche is also good for SEO, especially if you manage to get links without the famous nofollow attribute. But even if the links are nofollow (i.e. they are useless for SEO), they still help to get traffic to your site. If you manage to put your link in a visible place on a site with high volumes of traffic, you can get thousands of hits from this link alone. If you need list of sites within your niche where you could get backlinks from, check the Backlink Builder tool. However, be careful if you exchange links because linking to bad neighbors can do you a lot of harm.

6 Use any chance to promote your site for free.

Free promotion is always welcome, so don’t neglect it. There are many ways to promote your site for free and some of the most popular ones include free classified ads, submissions to directories, inclusion in various listings, etc. It is true that not all free ways to promote your site work well but if you select the right places to promote your site for free, this can also result in tons of traffic.  

7Create a free product or service.

Content drives most traffic when you offer something useful. There are many types of useful content you can create and they largely depend on the niche of your site. You can have articles with tons of advice, or short tips but one of the most powerful ways to get traffic is to create a free product or service. When this product or service gets popular and people start visiting your site, chances are that they will visit the other sections of the site as well.  

8Use viral content.

Free products and services are great for getting free traffic to your site and one of the best varieties in this aspect is viral content. Viral content is called so because it distributes like a virus – i.e. when users like your content, they send it to their friends, post it on various sites, and promote it for free in many different ways. Viral content distributes on its own and your only task is to create it and submit it to a couple of popular sites. After that users pick it and distribute it for you. Viral content can be a hot video or a presentation but it can also be a good old article or an image.

9Use offline promotion.

Offline promotion is frequently forgotten but it is also a way to get traffic for free. Yes, computers are everywhere and many people spend more time online than offline but still life hasn’t moved completely on the Web. Offline promotion is also very powerful and if you know how to use it, this can also bring you many visitors. Some of the traditional offline ways to promote your site include printing its URL on your company’s business cards and souvenirs or sticking it on your company vehicles. You can also start selling T-shirts and other merchandise with your logo and this way make your brand more popular.

10Include your URL in your signature.

URLs in forum signatures are also a way to get traffic for free. There are forums, which get millions of visitors a day and if you are a popular user on such a forum, you can use this to get traffic to your site. When you post on forums and people like your posts, they tend to click the link to your site on your signature to learn more about you. In rare cases you might be able to post a deep link (i.e. a link to an internal page of the site) rather than a link to your homepage and this is also a way to focus attention to a particular page. Unfortunately, deep links are rarely allowed.

Getting traffic for free is a vast topic and it is not possible to list all the ways to do it. However, if you know the most important ways – i.e. the ways we discussed in this article and you apply them properly, it is guaranteed that you will be able to get lots of traffic for free.

1 Check if backlinks have a “nofollow” attribute

Link exchanges are still one of the white hat ways to build backlinks but unfortunately, there are many unscrupulous webmasters, who will cheat you. One of the scams is when you pay somebody for a backlink, it suddenly disappears or has the “nofollow” attribute. That is why you should check from time to time if the link is still there and if it doesn’t have the “nofollow” attribute.

2 Getting good quality links but with useless anchor texts

It is great when PR of the site you are getting links from is high but when the anchor text is “Click here!” or something like that, such a link is barely useful. Keywords in the anchor text are vital, so if the backlink doesn’t have them, it isn’t a valuable one. Analyzing the anchor texts of links takes time but the Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer tool can do the hard job for you.

3 Getting an image link (when a text link with keyword is possible)

Sometimes when web masters hurry to get backlinks, they skip minor details, such as anchor text. Yes, an image link is great and it could even bring you more visitors than a text link (if the image is attractive, of course and users click it) but for SEO purposes nothing beats a keyword in the anchor text.

4 Not using ALT text if image link is the only possibility

Image links might be the worse option than text links but if an image link is the only possibility to get a backlink, don’t reject it. However, make sure that the ALT text of the image link has your keywords – this is more than nothing.

5 Getting backlinks from irrelevant websites

Now, this mistake is really a popular one! When hunting for backlinks, you should concentrate on relevant sites only. If you have a dating site, getting links from a finance one is not valuable. It is true that it is not easy to find relevant sites to get links from but unless your site is in a very narrow niche, chances are that there are hundreds or even thousands of relevant sites you can get a backlink from. If you need a list of such sites for your niche, try the Backlink Builder and see what suggestions it can give you.

6 Getting backlinks from sites/pages with tons of links

A backlink is more valuable, if it comes from a page, which is not cluttered with tons of other backlinks. Many pages have 200, or more links and if your link is one of them, this isn’t a great achievement. On the other hand, many directories put the “nofollow” attribute on nonpaid links, so actually even if there are 200 links on page and most of them are “nofollow” (but yours isn’t), this still counts.

7 Links from pages spiders can’t crawl

A link might look perfectly legitimate (i.e. keywords in the anchor text and no “nofollow” attribute) and still it might not be a link. This is especially an issue with link exchanges because you put a link to the other site but the other site doesn’t do the same for you. Links Google can’t index can be placed on dynamic pages or simply on pages, which are not indexed by Google because robots.txt bans it. That is why it doesn’t hurt to check from time if the pages your links are placed on are accessible to spiders. The Search Engine Spider Simulator tool can help you do this in no time at all.

8 Explicitly selling links

There is hardly a web master who hasn’t heard that paid links can hurt your rankings but still many web masters don’t miss the chance to make a few bucks. If you really want to sell links, you’d better use the specialized link selling services, such as Backlinks.com because they are more discreet. However, have in mind that while some of the paid links networks try to hide the fact that the links are paid, the rest are not that discreet. Also, maybe the worst gaffe you can make is to include phrases in website like “Buy 5 PR links for $10”or any other hint that you are selling links. You can include “Advertise here!” or similar messages and still de facto sell paid links but this is not as explicit as listing your prices for links.

9 Linking to sites with poor reputation

Linking to sites with poor reputation, also known as “bad neighbors” is one of the worst mistakes you can make. When you link to such sites, for Google this means that you endorse them and this results in penalties for you. That is why you must absolutely always check the sites (and their reputation) first before you link to them. Even if you are offered a lot of money to link to a site with poor reputation, you’d better decline the offer because otherwise your rating with search engines will suffer and this will cause you a lot of problems.

10 Linking to good sites gone bad

Even if you check carefully the sites you link to, sometimes it happens that a site, which used to be more or less decent all of a sudden starts publishing porn ads or other objectionable content. That is why it doesn’t hurt if you check not only that the outbound links you have are not broken but also where they lead to.

Links are very important and that is why you should pay attention to what links you are getting. It is not a waste of time to monitor what’s going on with your links and in addition to the tools listed in the article, you can also try the Backlink Summary tool.