Many people new to affiliate marketing make the mistake of inter-linking all of their sites together, thinking that they can pass link juice back and forth between sites. While this did work at one time, Google has caught on to these so-called “link-wheels.”
Linking in this fashion leaves a discernible footprint for Google to find, and when they find it, don’t be shocked when your sites start to sink so low in the search engines that only an incurable insomniac would ever have a chance of finding them again.
Linking all of your sites together is a particularly bad mistake if your sites happen to be on the same server. It will soon be very obvious that one person is doing all of the linking when all of the sites have the same IP address. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out, and Google has a lot more time, money and resources than the average person does.
For backlinking, you want one way links from a number of sources. You will want one-way links in to your site from RSS aggregators, high-PR article directories, micro-blogs such as Twitter, Web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo and Hub Pages as well as from social bookmarking sites such as Facebook and Mister Wong. It’s also nice to be able to get a profile link in a high PR-forum, although they can be very tricky and time consuming to find.
You may have seen a few sites offering to exchange reciprocal links, but this is not a good idea either. If all of your backlinks are from sites that you have outgoing links to, it looks very fishy, indeed. You want to leave as small of a footprint for the search engines as possible in your backlinking campaigns.
It takes a lot of time and effort to do backlinking properly and effectively. You should plan on spending 80% of your time creating backlinking campaigns, and the remaining 20% of your time building sites.
