One of the most discussed way to increase your SERP placement and PR ranking is back links to your site. The best kind of back link is a deep link from high PR page within a high PR site who talks about the same stuff your website is talking about i.e. related. This is the whole reason why people do blog commenting and even though the comment is made in a big fat zero page, as long as its in a high PR website and within the same niche, it is still a good bet to make especially if the blog is do follow. If the comment is good enough, you may actually see real traffic pass through the comment you made, but still the number one reason is for SERP placement and PR ranking.
There are tons of other ways to create back links to your site. It basically boils down to the webmasters doing something to its own website. Which mean that you are in control of your websites,and thats is the way it should be. While some back links are good, some doesn’t really help the cause. We can all agree on that.
However, one thing that still being discussed on forums and other blogs is bad neighborhoods back links. The term Bad Neighborhood can be loosely defined as a network of web sites that have an irregular amount of penalized or banned participants for various reasons. Simply put it iss websites Google hates. Would links from this so called “Bad Neighborhoods” reduce your website ranking?
There are many arguments against it, one that made perfect sense is that this would leave an open door for a competitor to destroy a perfectly good websites. But then again, a competitor could also click bombed a good website’s Google Ads, achieving the same result. So this point kind of mute.
The other thing is how would you control a link from other site to your website? They may look all right and related the day you let them link to you, but who knows 2 years down the track?
If we look at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, one point that talks about this says
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
By this definition, you are still in control of your ranking and you will only be penalized if you link to bad neighborhoods.
However, “How can I create a Google-friendly site?” page says
Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines.”
Now, this opens to many interpretations. By the above definition, all SEO linking can be classified as Unnatural Links. And if Google algo claimed that it can distinguish Unnatural Links from Natural one, you can be sure that it can also penalize your website for doing it.
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!