In today's world of sophisticated search engines there are good links and bad links—what we call natural and artificial incoming link structures. Building a network of good links, the natural ones, will reward your pages with ranking favor. Yielding to the siren song of the bad links, the artificial ones can sentence your pages to languish in dungeons of obscurity.

The important question you should be asking is: How do you tell the difference? Glad you asked.

For starters, it's important to understand that most types of links don't fall neatly into black and white boxes—neither do the penalties associated with the so-called bad links. If you have a lot of good links, then you can often be quite alright with having some bad ones. Clearly, one does not need to go on a witch-hunt to eradicate every bad link that's pointing to their Web site.

What's much more important is to avoid acquiring so many bad links that your site's link structure begins to trip the artificial link triggers that Google has in place to determine when a Web page or site warrants a smack down in the rankings.

So, without further adieu, I present to you the triggers that Google uses to determine if your site's overall link structure looks like a good guy or a bad guy from the search engine point of view.

And The Dirty Dozen are...

1. Link Farms