One of the more confusing aspects of search engine optimization these days revolves around the concept of linking strategies. And, judging from the topical questions we receive each month, some additional clarity on the subject is in order.

From day one the world wide web (www) has always been about links. Therefore it makes sense that search engines would develop algorithms based upon the logical tendency of web pages to link to other off-site web pages with content relevant to the topic of the linking page.

Of course, those of us who make our living online know that such relevance is KING. And, in general, the more relevance, the better because it forms the basis of page popularity. The more popular a page is, the more important it is considered to be in the eyes of the engines.

It is this very fact that spawned an era of escalating relevance until recently when Google effectively put a cap on it by applying what most are calling the over-optimization-penalty (OOP) – Google's way of identifying manipulated, and therefore artificial, relevance and factoring it into the equation that produces their overall search results.

Getting links the artificial way

Obtaining incoming links from offsite sources is very important, strategically, in terms of ranking well in today's organic (e.g., other than pay-per-click) search engines (think Google, Inktomi/Yahoo, FAST/AllTheWeb). In spite of the fact that each engine has its own formula for measuring a page's popularity, they all include this important element within their ranking algorithms.

Because it is so important, a variety of methods have been developed to quickly build links to a website. And in most cases, after these techniques became widely adopted, the engines developed countermeasures to defeat their ef...