The answer is simple: natural linking gives best results. So all your linking strategy must be as close as natural linking. There are various link farm pages, link directories, special pages in projects created just for links. Do they give some tangible benefit?
YES they DO, but as the time goes by, the smaller benefit you get from it.
Why?
The answer again is simple: this is not natural linking. Link farms emerged just because people wanted to get higher results in serps. These pages don’t give additional value to the site and only few users will navigate through these link pages. In common words it’s a section in page created for the search engine robot, not for the visitor.
how to link?
The best link is the context link. If there is article somewhere related to your theme its good idea to think how to get a link from there.
You can write your articles, add links to other websites and ask a link backs from other articles which are related to content.
Link pages are still OK if they are not overloaded with thousands of links. With the contextual linking you increase value of your link page, because you don’t need to add everybody to your links page.
People will say – its nonsense. Why to drive the customer away from my site through the links? The answer is simple again – you get customers the same way from other websites as well, ask link partners to do the same as you do, and everything will be OK.

Its a lot of work, but please understand that internet market grows bigger and becomes wiser. Search engines are way more intelligent than 5 years ago. These dark ages when you could get high rankings just by adding lots of keywords to your page are gone forever.

First of all I would like to wish everybody not to get banned at all. But lets say this thing happened. Lets say your site disappeared from Google and toolbar shows grey line. What to do?

First think what you’ve done wrong. The first page you should read is Google guidelines. Some people hire so called “SEO experts”. its very important to know who is legitimate SEO expert. If this “SEO expert” assures you that doorway pages, blog spam, hidden text, cloaked sections will give you a boost in SERPS, get away from him. He is not a SEO expert after all.

Lets say you did one of these mentioned mistakes. Of course you can get a rise for a short time, but you risk to get banned. And the risk is usually bigger than you imagine. You can loose the domain without the possibility to get back.

So what to do?
First acknowledge that this is a problem and try to find what was done wrong. Enter you domain in google index and see if google has it in the index. Take a look at the toolbar assure that it is grey in every page of you site. If your site is banned google will not display your site and the toolbar will be grey.
there are 2 things you can do:
1. change the domain name and carefully check insite coding to see if there are no any tricks that doesn’t meet google guidelines.
2. try to clear up the site. carefully fix all tricks that doesn’t meet google guidelines and write a letter to Google, with full explanations what was done to the site, outlining the removal of the offending elements. The letter should request a complete examination of the site, as well as reinstatement into the search listings. Next step is only to wait: its not worth to add new links, add new content because google might consider not to unblock the site. It that case the only option is to take new domain and start all over again without making mistakes.

Under no circumstances should a website owner fall for the offers of various SEO firms claiming any sort of special relationship with Google. There is NO such relationships exist between any firms and Google.

Is Alexa a parasite? Some people think that it is. But I don’t agree with them. Alexa’s Toolbar is a Browser Helper Object (BHO), a component of Internet Explorer that will load whenever it starts, shares IE memory context, can perform any action on the available windows and modules. There is no version of Alexa toolbar which installs automatically. There is no version of Alexa toolbar which don’t have uninstall feature. Depending on the version it is in different places of the system. Yes Alexa gathers information about the web pages you view, the data you enter in online forms and search fields, and, with versions 5.0 and higher, the products you purchase online while using the toolbar service. Although Alexa does not attempt to analyze web usage data to determine the identity of any Alexa user, some information collected by the toolbar service is personally identifiable. Alexa aggregates and analyzes the information it collects to improve its service and to prepare reports about aggregate web usage and shopping habits. Online marketers use Alexa gathered information to evaluate websites. Some websites might say: a) we have more than a million visitors b) we established on 1999 c) we get millions of page views All this we can check with Alexa. Check it and you will be surprised how many sites spreads lies about themselves. What does these numbers means on Alexa? Alexa shows the rating of the website. Imagine that all websites of the internet are placed in a row. The closer to the start, the bigger site is. In common words I can say: Alexa from 1 to 1000 are the industry leaders, they get enormous traffic and can be named as the leaders of the internet. Alexa from 1000 to 10.000 are really huge sites, gets lots of traffic, usually are the leaders in their theme. Alexa from 10.000 to 50.000 are quite big sites, gets some global traffic. Alexa from 50.000 to 100.000 are average sites, they don’t have a lot of traffic, but usually these are the sites which are online for some time. Alexa from 100.000 to 500.000 are small sites, gets very small amount of traffic. Alexa from 500.000 to 1.000.000 are very small sites, usually just emerged in the internet. Alexa over 1.000.000 the new site, usually gets tiny amount of traffic or don’t get at all. Is Alexa information accurate? Not always. There are various exceptions to these statistics. Don’t use Alexa information as some kind of rule. It is just one of criteria to evaluate websites. Average Statistic gathered by asking something from the certain amount of people. The more answers you will get the more accurate statistic will be. Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. So we can say that their numbers are quite accurate. But there are exceptions. For example: 1. If you site is about the viruses and spyware – Alexa rank will be lower, because lots of people keen on security treat Alexa as parasite and simply don’t have toolbar on their computers. 2. Local sites gets less accuracy in the stats. If your site is Lithuanian, then you must know that your real stats are a bit different, because Alexa counts global traffic, not local. 3. If your site lets say created to Mozilla or opera community, you will get not so accurate statistic too, because toolbar designed for explorer, not for other browsers. And your site gets visitors who don’t use explorer and Alexa toolbar.

What is Google sandbox?
Google sandbox is special filter invented by Google in march 2004 with the Florida update. In normal words I call it partial penalty in Google. Your site is not banned, your PR is not dropped to zero, but you are ranking lower than used to be for no other particular reason.

What sites are placed in the sandbox?
Any site can be placed in the sandbox, but usually sites with more competitive keywords are put on probation in the sandbox. They still rank well with less competitive keywords, but for the best keywords they do not rank well while they are in the sandbox. New sites created after March 2004 which tries to compete with high competitive keywords also have big chance to be placed in the Google sandbox.

Why the site can be sandboxed?
It can be sandboxed because of possible spam, possible fraud, detected unnatural linking schemes, spammy techniques, overusal of keywords and other things who are not ethical and not allowed by Google.

How long the sandbox effect lasts?
Usually from 1 to 6 months. The more competitive site is – the longer period it will be in the sandbox.

Is everybody Sure that this “sandbox” exists?
No, not everybody agree. There are people who tells that this is a myth and there is no any secret Google filter. But usually they don’t have normal explanation why some strange things happens to some good websites. The only explanation they give – at the moment you look your site is too weak compared with others that’s why it is ranked low. I can’t agree with that.

What to do while the site is in the sandbox?
Wait. The time is the cure. It is a good time to add more content and more powerful links. You will get boost after the things will clear. It is good time to look at the site with the new eyes, fix mistakes, remove any spammy techniques.

Google announced new technique to fight against comment spam in various blogs. Yesterday (Jan 18) Google created (rel=”nofollow”) attribute on hyperlinks. Those links won’t get any credit when Google will rank websites in their search results. As Google say, there won’t be any negative effect for the sites linked from blogs, but they will not get any credit either. it’s just a way to fight spammers and prevent abuse of blogs.
According to Google the same actions are taken at Yahoo and MSN.

read more information at: Google blog

According to Ken Moss, the General Manger of MSN Search Dev & Test: < ...> “Over the coming weeks, our MSNBot crawler will start respecting this new tag, and sometime after that MSN Spaces will start to support this as well < ...> ”

read more information at: msn blog

Its wonderful that All major and Competing between themselves players can agree on anything that quickly.