This is a guest post from Tad Chef (Onreact), you can check out more of his blogging on SEO 2.0 and over at SEOptimise.
Over the years Google has maintained that inbound links can’t hurt your site yet many webmasters get notified via Google Webmaster Tools of “unnatural links” when they get penalized. What are unnatural links and how can you spot them? Aren’t all links great? How to prevent an epic link building FAIL?
The bad news: Not all links are created equal, some of them are evil. The good news: We know how the evil links look and we can spot them. There are even tools which assist you with this task.
As we all know good natural links grow on trees, so to say.
As on the Web there are no trees, unless in games like Farmville, you have to grow your organic links on websites. Unlike organic food sadly websites do not have clear badges proving that a site has certified organic links. Some sites may boast they have such links but you have to check and find out yourself whether it’s true.