70 percent of your placement in Google searches depends on the links that are coming into your website and going out of it.  If you're thinking of improving your results on Google with link exchange, you can do a lot of good for your website—but you can also do a lot of harm.  Minimizing the risks of using link exchange for Google search rankings will mean taking some precautions ahead of time.  In this guide, you'll find out why Google and link exchange don't always get along, and how you can use link exchange appropriately to make your website's reputation better, not worse.

Why People Use Link Exchange for Google SEO

When people started trying to change search results on Google with link exchange, their reason was simple: link exchange on Google was one of the single fastest ways to build a link presence.  Google was link exchange central for some time, and that happened because Google made link results so important.

When people first connected search results with Google and link exchange, they discovered that the search engine didn't particularly care where their links came from—just that they had a large number of them.  Link exchange made Google much easier to game: all you needed to do was use any one of a number of huge link exchange websites or applications.  Within hours or days you could have hundreds or thousands of links.

Google link exchange became not just a way for people to personally improve their website rankings, it became a business.  That's where link exchange and Google began to clash.

Google and Link Exchange: Conflicting Goals

Link exchange and Google clash with each other because there are two completely different goals at stake.  People who are doing Google link exchange know that their primary goal is to direct users to their website—whether or not that website is actually the best place for a user to find the information they're looking for.  However, unlike a link exchange, Google needs to try to find the very best search result for a user.

The only time that Google wants to give a website special status for spending money is when the website spends money on Google advertising.  However, study after study shows that most people simply never click “sponsored results” on Google or other search engines.  This means that Google link exchange and other inbound link building techniques are among the best ways to improve your overall web traffic and conversions—as long as you know how to do it without getting on Google's bad side.

Affecting Search Results on Google with Link Exchange

Today, any links that you create through link exchange for Google search rankings will contribute their authority, or “link juice.”  You get more link juice for websites that for one reason or another (high traffic, .edu or .gov top level domain names) are considered more authoritative by Google.  Google link exchange will be more successful if you're able to snag an exchange with more than one high authority value website.

If you're creating too many links from link exchange and Google notices that you're doing it, you're likely to see a very different effect on your search rankings.  The clash between Google and link exchange websites culminated in a massive change to the way the search engine ranks sites, and today, known link exchangers are penalized in searches.  If you use link exchange for Google results too frequently or too blatantly, don't be surprised if you see that your website is no longer getting the traffic it used to.  It may have been forced far down into the rankings as punishment for overuse of Google link exchange.

Beating Google: Link Exchange Tactics that Still Work

If you're trying to use link exchange for Google results without facing penalties, you'll need to get creative.  Start thinking like a search engine: how can you bring your website's goals (increased traffic) into harmony with Google's goals (good search results)?  The answer is easy to understand, but hard to implement.

If you make your website extremely high quality, then using Google link exchange is unlikely to have a serious detrimental effect.  Link exchange and Google can work harmoniously to bring publicity to a website that's actually doing a great job.  For instance, if you're offered an award for your law blog, you may want to link back to the organization giving the award—this kind of reciprocal linking isn't usually frowned upon by Google and won't incur penalties.

You can also work on creating link exchange for Google rankings by talking to people you actually know, or people with websites similar to yours, about a possible exchange.  Google link exchange is actually much less likely to incur penalties when you're using contextual linking methods rather than shotgunning your link exchange randomly across the entire web.

If You're Being Penalized by Google For Link Exchange

There's not much worse than waking up to the news that your link exchange for Google was detected as over optimization.  If this happens, you'll receive an email, and you must act fast to make sure that your website doesn't lose all of the traffic you've worked so hard to gain.

It will be a time consuming process, but you will need to use an online inbound link checker program to find out where all your links are coming from.  Whatever Google link exchange links you were using, you're going to want to take them down.  You can worry about rebuilding some of your link exchange for Google rankings later—right now the important thing is undoing the damage.

In some cases, you may find that webmasters are reluctant to let you take down your links.  When this happens, you don't have to give up on your efforts to remove the links.  You can simply advise Google of your efforts, and give them proof that you tried to have the links removed.

An online reputation manager is a person whose job description didn't even exist ten years ago.  In just a few short years, reputation management online has become a multimillion dollar industry with competitors popping up all over the United States and around the world.  Whether you're using online reputation management software to help you do the job yourself, or have hired an online reputation manager, this guide will make sure you know the biggest do's and don'ts for the next year.

DO Take Down Libelous Content

There's no reason that you should have to put up with defamation.  Online reputation management often includes sending takedown notices to websites that are hosting content that is libelous.  If you're not sending takedown notices to these websites, you won't be able to have the information removed and it may be one of the first things that potential clients see when they search for your website.

It's very common today for unscrupulous competitors to try to sabotage your reputation management online by posting negative reviews or otherwise defaming your company.  An online reputation manager can identify these negative posts immediately and will ask you whether they are true or not.  If they're not true, best practices for online reputation management call for an immediate takedown notice.  Obviously, truth is a defense to libel, so if your online reputation manager discovers that the negative review is true, they will have to use different tactics for your reputation management online.

DON'T Issue Takedowns For Honest Critique

Even though you may feel sensitive to negative things that people are saying about your company online, it's a huge mistake for your online reputation manager to issue a takedown notice if you don't really have legal grounds to.  If you're not really being libeled and send out a takedown notice as part of your online reputation management strategy, you could be ridiculed—even publicly—as a result.

If you see honest critiques or things that just involve people expressing a disgruntled opinion, sometimes the best response for your reputation management online is just to ignore them and work on building more positive links for yourself.  An online reputation manager who tries to make these go away with takedowns is attempting censorship, rather than real online reputation management.

DO Create a Positive Social Media Vibe

Using social media is a good tool for your online reputation manager.  By doing online reputation management through Facebook or Twitter, you can put your best foot forward and force any negative links about you to lower ranked search result pages, where they'll only be seen by the most dedicated researchers.

Having an upbeat, interesting personality on social media websites can help your online reputation management significantly.  It's important for your reputation management online that you make your social networking content engaging and easy for people to talk about.  This can lead to people sharing links, and your online reputation management posts becoming a virally shared source of new links.

DON'T Sound Fake or “Corporate”

Just because you come to the office in a suit doesn't mean that your Twitter and Facebook accounts need to be dull and ponderous.  Online reputation management is easiest when you sound like a real person.  Try to avoid sounding either too formal or too self-consciously casual for your reputation management online.  Either of these extremes is likely to come off as fake to your friends and followers, and you want to portray yourself as honest and trustworthy.

DO Improve Your Directory Listings

Your online reputation manager can do a lot of the heavy lifting for this one.  Online reputation management is significantly easier when you've created the listing for your website on directories.  Directory listings often remain largely blank until someone fills them out, and you could be missing out on a big tool for reputation management online if you're not using them.

Your directory listings can often include not only a text blurb about your firm and its mission, but also graphics that help you extend your brand awareness.  Since directories are often prominent in searches, this form of online reputation management also helps you to keep negative results off the front page.

DON'T Make Fake Websites or Reviews

One of the first thoughts many law firms have about online reputation management is: “if there's a negative review that's fake, why can't I make a ton of positive reviews that are just as fake but will drive new clients to my business?”  While this is indeed a strategy that is used by some online reputation manager types, there are several reasons that it should not be among your strategies for reputation management online.

First of all, do you really think you'll be able to keep the secret forever?  Many review websites are very sensitive to fake reviews for reputation management online, and will pull your reviews if they detect several from the same IP address.  Your online reputation manager will be in big trouble if you're caught out lying for reviews.  You could even run into ethics problems with your local or state bar association if you're not careful.  It's not worth risking your license to practice law over—use different techniques for your reputation management online.

DO Create Conversation with Critics

Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't mean you should be silent and just let them talk.  If you're willing to engage in open, honest communication with your critics, you'll be seen as reasonable and assertive.  If someone says something negative about your law firm in a blog, for example, you can make a comment on the blog that engages with their point of view but disagrees with it.

DON'T Shut Down All Negative Reviews

In some cases, a negative review can actually help your reputation management online.  How?  If your online reputation manager is taking down all or almost all negative reviews, people may start to suspect that you are somehow gaming the system.  By keeping at least some negative reviews—perhaps the ones with the most positive overall outlook on your firm—your online reputation manager can help you to present a more appealing and honest public face.

A single negative review online can cost 9% of your revenues if it's prominently placed, according to studies.  The internet's memory is forever.  If someone says something bad about your law firm even once and posts it online, it can appear in people's search results about your law firm for weeks, months, or even years.  Managing your online reputation is the key to avoiding having any unwanted links on the first several pages of search results.  In this guide, we'll discuss several online reputation management tools that are specifically designed to help you keep yourself looking great to the public.  You'll learn several tips for managing your online reputation, and how to take down some of the worst links about your company.

Are the Best Online Reputation Management Tools Free?

While it's true that there are free online reputation management tools available from several different companies, managing your online reputation isn't always cheap.  The price range is very wide: some of the best tools actually cost several hundred dollars for a year's license, while others have free trials or low basic rates.

When you use free online reputation management tools to manage your online reputation, you probably won't get much in the way of advanced features.  You may be able to see what links are mentioning you, but not whether the links portray you in a positive, neutral, or negative light.  Free online reputation management tools almost never offer you the option to repair your reputation through the creation of new content.

Keep in mind that managing your online reputation is extremely important.  If a few clients see a bad review or libelous content about your law firm, you could lose their business before they ever make a call, costing you thousands of dollars.  It can definitely be worth it for people in high-competition businesses, like law firms, to shell out money for great online reputation management tools.

Google: Making the Best Free Online Reputation Management Tools

Google is the undisputed king of giving away useful tools for webmasters and marketing professionals.  There are several different ways that you can start managing your online reputation with Google.  For example, you can set up Google Alerts that will notify you whenever your company is mentioned in a site that Google indexes.

Of course, in order to start managing your online reputation using Google Alerts, you'll need to know exactly what phrases and words you're looking for.  It can be tedious to use the alert system, especially if the search strings you're using also bring up results about other law firms or other people.

Monitor What People Say About Your Site: Trackur

Claiming to be “social media monitoring tools made easy,” Trackur offers a streamlined but still robust user interface while allowing you to monitor news mentions and even track the reputation of your competitors.  Trackur says that it can give you results for new mentions of your website even when the mentions are less than half an hour old—perfect for handling public relations problems or touchy legal situations.

While Trackur may be among the most comprehensive online reputation management tools in the world, it doesn't come cheap.  After a ten day free trial, the most basic package is $18 a month but doesn't let you use many of Trackur's advanced features.  The best packages cost nearly $400 per month.  Is it worth it?  That depends on how badly you want to make sure your reputation stays good, and how serious you are about really managing your online reputation.

The Snapshot: Reputation.Com

Reputation.com is another of the online reputation management tools that gives you the most information.  You can find out what new reviews about your firm say.  Unlike Trackur, this service doesn't yet support social network alerts, although the company claims that this service will be coming soon for their clients.

Reputation.com also tells you right away, with a snapshot view, whether the reviews you're receiving are positive, neutral, or negative.  Managing your online reputation is much easier when you can use this kind of birds'-eye view.

What's more, Reputation.com is one of the few online reputation management tools that will actually help you change the search rankings of negative reviews and bad publicity.  It works by managing your online reputation with tiered, high quality links to the pages you want, which push the negative pages to the bottom of searches.

Monitor Phrases Being Said About You: BrandsEye

Brandseye distinguishes itself from other online reputation management tools by using crowdsourcing to change alerts into real insights about how your business is being perceived online.  BrandsEye bases its pricing on how many distinct phrases you want to monitor.  BrandsEye is known by search engine optimization marketing professionals as one of the better designed online reputation management tools.  If you're looking for a tool that can automate a great deal of the day to day management of your online reputation, BrandsEye may be just the ticket.

The Twitter Specialist: TweetBeep

If you are only interested in managing your online reputation with a single social network, you might want to make it Twitter, which is very influential in search results.  TweetBeep gives you very specific functionalities for managing your online reputation on Twitter, but keep in mind that if you want more social media monitoring, you'll need to use another tool.  For most attorneys, TweetBeep won't be the best of these management tools, but a practice with a very popular Twitter feed might like the features.

Managing Your Online Reputation: Changing the Buzz Manually

Of course, you don't necessarily need to use any online reputation management tools to manage your online reputation.  The best cure for bad publicity is good publicity, and one of the best ways to manage your online reputation is to create positive buzz about your company.  Whether it's by asking your loyal clients for positive reviews or creating new press releases, you can often turn around the effects of negative reviews by simply posting more content of your own.

“How can I protect my reputation online?” is one of the biggest questions many businesses have today.  You've worked hard to build a good reputation in your community and on the internet.  But a single failure to protect the online reputation of your firm can hurt your total revenue by almost 10 percent—even if it was a negative review posted by your rivals in an attempt to drive you out of business.  It's important to protect the online reputation of your law firm, and to do that, you'll need a primer.  In this guide, you'll learn how to protect your online reputation with simple, easy to use tips.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Avoid Unnatural Links

Being a spammer is one of the worst online reputations that you can have.  To protect the online reputation of your law firm, you need to project an image of an authoritative, professional business with quality content.  If you've used any kind of unnatural link building in the past, you should check those links in order to protect your online reputation.

If you find links that look spammy, you need to ask to have them removed to protect the online reputation of your firm.  “How does that protect my reputation online?” you may ask.  The answer is simple: if people searching for your website find that site first—or at all—they may not feel like you're a trustworthy enough law firm to do business with.

Unnatural links are being cracked down upon by Google anyhow, so you'll not only protect your online reputation when you do this—you'll also protect your search engine rankings.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Use Social Networks

If you want to protect the online reputation of a law firm in 2012 or 2013, one of the first things you need to do is get social networking accounts on every major social network.  How does that protect my reputation online?  Because if you don't do this, it will be much harder to protect your online reputation on these sites, or even see if people are talking about you.

Social networks can also be a great way to protect your online reputation by getting out the call to people you know and trust.  If you're a small law firm and your competition has recently launched a black hat campaign to give you bad reviews, you can put a call out on Facebook and Twitter: “Help me protect my reputation online—give me a good review if you've had a good experience.”  This can net you big numbers of reviews from your best clients.

Because social networking links tend to be displayed relatively early in search results, you can also create content on social networks to protect the online reputation of your law firm.  This content can protect your online reputation by pushing the content you don't want people to see off the front page and into the rankings nobody reads.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Monitor What People Say

To protect your online reputation, you may want to enlist help.  There are many different online tools that help to protect the online reputation of businesses.  Some of these reputation management software packages are totally free—like the alert system offered by Google—but those with more advanced functions, like automation of changes to your search rankings, can cost thousands of dollars every year you use them to protect your online reputation.

Whether you choose to start with a more streamlined free tool or a more comprehensive paid tool to protect the online reputation of your law firm, you should monitor your online reputation at least once every week.  This helps you get a feel for the trends affecting your reputation, as well as manage a new negative review quickly before it's been able to get much traction with other users online.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Build Links Slowly

Your reputation online isn't just being measured by individual people.  Search engines like Google are also keeping track of your link presence, and in some cases you'll need to be careful to protect the online reputation of your law firm.  If Google decides that your website has been optimized too much for search engine performance, there's a chance that you'll see a major rankings penalty.

“But how can I protect my online reputation while building links?” may be your next question.  Protect your online reputation by knowing what natural links look like.  The biggest sign that a website is building its link popularity artificially is that links appear by the thousands on some days, while on other days no new links are made to your site.  That's not the pattern that websites building their link presence naturally have—they build links much more steadily, with smaller spikes when new content is created or shared.  You can protect the

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Avoid Security Breaches

This may sound like it goes without saying, but you can't protect the online reputation of your firm if you're not protecting your own website.  Using insecure passwords and outdated software on your website could leave you vulnerable to hacking attempts and denial of service attacks, and these can compromise your online reputation for months or years to come if you're not careful.  

What's more, if you keep private client information connected to your website in any way, hacking attempts could breach your security and steal that client information—any lawyer's worst nightmare.  If you're not sure how secure you really are, you may want to consult with an IT security professional to make sure that your website is safe and protect your online reputation.

How to Protect My Reputation Online: Don't Astroturf

To protect the online reputation of your law firm, you can't astroturf, making fake reviews or websites to defame a client or promote yourself.  You may think this is a way to protect your online reputation, but it's almost always too obvious and discovered very quickly.  Protect the online reputation you've built with natural methods, not by pretending to be someone you're not.  If you try to protect your online reputation with astroturfing, your state bar association may be very unhappy—and trying to excuse it by saying “I was just trying to protect my reputation online” won't cut it.

Millions of websites today are working on building an artificial link presence that isn't really based on quality content and fair play.  Instead, they're gaming the system and creating an artificial link structure designed explicitly to rocket them to the top of the search rankings.  However, every time you create an artificial link, you're leaving a trail that search engines may be able to detect.  In this guide, we'll take a look at how Google detects when law firms are using an artificial link structure.  You can use this information either to make an artificial link that looks natural, or—hopefully—to make a decision not to use artificial links as part of your search engine optimization strategy.

What's the Difference Between Natural and Artificial Links?

Natural links come about because of natural processes.  Anyone who links to your website because they know you in person, saw your link on a social media site, or just loved one of your blog entries is creating a natural link.

An artificial link is very different.  Artificial links are designed with search engine optimization as their biggest—and often sole—priority.  People tend to build these links by using automated link creation programs.  These link creation programs make for a very detectable artificial link structure, and Google and other search engine companies monitor the development of artificial link creation software heavily.  If you are believed to be engaged in creating artificial links, Google reserves the right to penalize your website by making it appear much later in search rankings.

If you're caught buying links, you can expect to be penalized for this method of artificial link building.  If you're caught selling them, though, expect your future to be even bleaker: Google is known to completely de-list websites caught creating artificial link structure for other sites.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Bursts of Activity

One of the easiest ways to make sure that any artificial link creation you do remains undetected by Google is to make links relatively slowly.  Unless a website becomes a real viral sensation overnight, complete with traffic patterns that reflect virality, it's very unlikely that it will get one huge burst of links and then have barely any inbound links created for a month.

The only time that kind of pattern occurs is when an artificial link structure is being built.  This is a top sign of artificial link creation and remains the most common way that Google identifies websites using black hat techniques for search engine optimization.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Identical Anchor Text

Because exact keyword match anchor text can make a bigger difference to your search rankings, some people make every artificial link they build have the same exact keyword anchor text.  But think about it: do websites that are creating links naturally use this kind of linking often?  Natural links might have anchor text like “over here” or “this” or “my favorite law firm,” rather than a specific keyword match that you designed for maximum search engine optimization.

Anyone trying to make an artificial link structure while avoiding detection needs to be careful to vary their anchor text substantially from link to link.  Yes, this will take longer—but it will also prevent your artificial link building from being noticed by Google.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Links from the Same IP

When artificial link building programs put your links on many different websites, some of these programs can make a huge mistake.  If Google detects that too many of your links come from the same IP address, there's only one reasonable explanation: your artificial link building program is hosting your links on many websites that are all hosted on the same servers.

You should run an inbound link checker periodically to look for this sign of an artificial link structure, especially if you are using any kind of automated link building program.  If you see many, many links that all come from wildly different URLs but the same IP address, you need to talk to the people building your links about having some of them removed or changed.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Too Many Reciprocal Links

Automated link exchange schemes were one of the biggest ways to create an artificial link presence on the web in the mid '00s.  Today, though, if you have too many reciprocal links, Google will assume that you're building them artificially, and can penalize you with its new detection algorithm, Google Penguin.

Instead, you should focus on building one way links for the most part.  Having a number of reciprocal links isn't necessarily bad, as long as they're built naturally and don't reflect your entire link presence online.  Just try to keep them a fairly small percentage of your overall links, and you should be fine.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Poor Quality Links

If your links all come from blogs with bizarre, garbled entries and no comment moderation, it's very unlikely that Google is going to consider these links helpful to your search rankings.  You should try to build links from websites that have a relatively high Google PageRank, indicating that they have attained a level of high popularity and authority with Google users.

Signs of an Artificial Link Structure: Content Spinner Sites

One of the easiest ways for lawyers to build an artificial link presence a few years ago was to use so-called “article spinners” that posted the same article content in many different places all over the web.  However, these websites were easy to identify: they accepted any press release or article submission, and explicitly worked to create inbound links on other sites.

If you used one of these websites, an update called Google Panda likely negated the value of all of your link building there.  Google identified the top offenders and made their links worthless, so that now it's a very bad idea to waste your time with the same kinds of content spinner websites.  Get your content to spread naturally and virally, not artificially with automated programs.

If you're planning to improve your search engine optimization in 2013, you may want to become one of the over 50 percent of small law firms that maintains a blog.  Blogs are one of the best ways to increase your website readership quickly and to generate the inbound links that are the foundation of all contemporary SEO strategies.  One of the ways that you can generate inbound links with your blog is through blog link exchange.  While many types of link exchange are actually considered harmful for websites, there are ways to do blog link exchange right.  In this guide you'll find out how to link exchange with blog owners in a way that won't lead to penalties or regrets.

The Problem With Traditional Link Exchange

Link exchange has been one of the foundational principles of getting inbound links ever since search engines started using links to determine rankings.  However, as people got wise to the ways that search engines were creating their rankings lists, they started to game the system.  Some clever people working in search engine optimization realized that any time people created reciprocal links, both of them were getting “link juice,” or authority, that helped drive their rankings up.

Their solution was to automate link exchange.  Soon, blog link exchange was no longer a matter of finding other people with relevant interests—it was just about inserting a piece of code onto your website and watching the links roll in without your input or even necessarily your knowledge.  Instead of showing which websites you were actually interested in, this kind of automated link exchange with blog owners just led to sites filled with reciprocal link spam.

What's So Different About Ethical Blog Link Exchange?

Blog link exchange doesn't have to look like that.  Lawyers are in a unique position in terms of link exchange with blog owners.  Why?  Because law blogs are about very interesting events and news topics, and because many different law blogs have various subject matter intersection points.  This is a perfect environment to start link exchange for blog SEO.

When you do ethical blog link exchange, you're not doing a link exchange for blog optimization exclusively.  You're also doing it because you believe that your blog readers will be interested in what the writer of the other blog has to say.  Blog link exchange of this type will usually mean that the vast majority of blogs you have reciprocal links with are also about law, perhaps even about the same specialty of law that you're practicing and writing about.

How To Do Blog Link Exchange Right

If you want to link exchange with blog owners, you're going to need to get to know them first.  That means beginning to read law blogs.  Blog link exchange will only be ethical if you're picking places to exchange links based on the actual content and quality of the blogs in question.

When you decide that you want to link exchange your blog, you can send a brief but not generic email to the person who runs the blog you want to link to.  Ask them if they might be interested in doing a blog link exchange with you.  If they aren't interested, don't try to force the issue—there are plenty of other places to do link exchange with blog owners.  Usually, it will be much easier to get someone to agree to a blog link exchange if you've already commented on their posts and interacted with them once or twice, or if they already read and comment on your blog.

Instead of just doing a link exchange with blog owners, you may want to exchange the links through mutual guest posts.  By guest posting on someone else's blog and allowing them to guest blog on yours, you're not only generating blog link exchange, you're also making sure that your readers hear about another blog that you find interesting and worthwhile.

If you wouldn't want someone to guest post on your blog, you may want to reconsider the reasons that you want to do a blog link exchange with them.  Link exchange with blog owners is really only advisable when you're exchanging links with people you actually respect and want to read.

How To Do Blog Link Exchange Wrong

Usually, doing the wrong kind of link exchange with blog owners will involve sending mass emails to bloggers, requesting mutual links.  If you find yourself spamming dozens of bloggers in a single night, you can safely assume that you're doing blog link exchange wrong.  Not only is this an unethical way to do link exchange with blog owners, it's also very likely to lead to Google penalties.

The worst way to do blog link exchange is to try to get exchange with very low quality blogs or blogs that have little or nothing to do with the law or your practice area.  This is generally seen as a sign of desperation and won't look good on your blog when potential clients see it.

Use Caution: Don't Use All Links From Blog Link Exchange

Even if you're doing a great job and have managed to do link exchange with blog owners all over the country, it's not a good idea to have the majority of your links come from blog link exchange.  Why?  Because Google tends to assume that anyone with too many reciprocal links is actually using the unethical methods of link exchange.

You should try to keep your overall number of links made through link exchange with blog owners to a small percentage of your total inbound links.  If you do this, Google won't identify your behavior as potential evidence of over optimization, and you're much less likely to incur any penalties for your linking preferences.

Consider adding to your links from social networking websites, social bookmarking hubs, and directories in order to establish a pattern of developing one way links as well as reciprocal links.