Article by LinksManager.com Staff - © 2009, Reproduction without permission prohibited.

With the left side of its mouth, Google says it bases your site's ranking, in part, on the quantity, relevance and quality of your links and that reciprocal links are a natural and valid part of the equation that defines the World Wide Web. With the right side of its mouth, it vows to punish you if you add "excessive" links to your site.

"Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating ... some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's Webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking ... examples of link schemes can include ... excessive link exchanging."

-- Google Webmaster Help Center

"It's natural that reciprocal links happen ... we do still encourage people to have interesting and helpful links. What you need to do is avoid excessive reciprocal links. What we mean when we say avoid excessive reciprocal links is if your portfolio has a very large fraction of links where you're getting them by sending automated emails ... "

-- Matt Cutts, Google Webspam Team Leader

Does all the above sound paradoxical? Contradictory? Catch-22-like, even?

With the left side of its mouth, Google says it bases your site's ranking, in part, on the quantity, relevance and quality of your links and that reciprocal links are a natural and valid part of the equation that defines the World Wide Web. With the right side of its mouth, it vows to punish you if you add "excessive" links to your site.

Surely it would seem that the word "quantity," in the context used in the Help Center document, should mean that the more high-quality, relevant links you have the better. But then they throw in that word "excessive," which seems to mean that if you have too many links you'll be penalized.

What's going on here? Several things, one of which happens to be the fact that Google speaks in its own dialect. That means, in many cases, that it doesn't use words the same way most of us do.

Consider the word "excessive" for example. Here's how Merriam-Webster defines it: Exceeding what is usual, proper, necessary, or normal.

But clearly, based on the quality guidelines and the statements by Google's Lord High Executioner as quoted above, that is not how Google defines it. In Googlespeak, "excessive", at least as regards linking, is not about the quantity of your links but about the quality of those links, the method by which you obtained them (automatically or manually) and the pace at which you added them to your site.

The truth is almost all sites with high return positions on all the major search engines contain links. Some have less than ten, others have hundreds or even thousands. What they all have in common is links that were carefully selected by a human, were added to the site in a rational, natural manner, and are truly relevant to the site's topic and offer useful information to end users.

Now that we've got all the definitions out of the way, here's the three Golden Rules for building a robust, productive linking program without violating Google's excessive linking policy.

Rule One: Never, ever forget that GoogleBot is a mathematical algorithm. As such, it is happiest operating in an orderly, predictable universe. Any planet it finds spinning out of what it considers a proper orbit is assumed to be behaving badly until proven otherwise.

Maybe that sounds a bit overly Zen like, but it's true. There are advanced math concepts based on disorder and chaos theories, but search engines don't use them. They expect one and one to always equal two in every dimension, not 2.2 in some time/space continuums and 2.3 in others.

As relates to "excessive linking," that means adding 150 links to your site in one batch is almost certainly going to be viewed as excessive even if each of the links is high quality and relevant. Large amounts of links added to a site at the same time disorders Googlebot's universe. It conflicts with its programmed belief that, to paraphrase Matt Cutts, links are supposed to "happen" naturally. Conversely, if those same 150 quality links were added five at a time, three days a week for ten weeks, you would get -- instead of a penalty for excessive linking -- the benefits of having a large number of relevant links that were allowed to develop organically over a reasonable period of time.

LinksManager's patented technology and robust suite of step-by-step guides and tutorials makes it easy for you to consistently add small groups of links at regular, orderly intervals. Links that will age and change as your site changes. Links and their related anchor text that may benefit your PageRank a second way by providing a continuous source of fresh new content to your site as they are added.

Links that will look natural, healthy and non-spammy to search engines because they are natural, healthy and non-spammy.

Rule Two: Never, ever try to cheat, particularly by using some form of automated link collection and posting system (often called "full-duplex linking") or buying into some scam that promises it will "increase your page rank," or put your site "in the top ten returns," or get you "hundreds of one-way links" through three-way linking, or give you links from so-called "quality sites" whose only purpose is to post links, or other such schemes.

There's a fatal virus lurking in all those offers and it can kill your site dead ... at least as far as the Google Index is concerned. That virus is this: They all violate one (usually more) Goggle guidelines against such things as cross-linking scams, automated e-mail link solicitations, remotely adding irrelevant or low-quality links, etc.

Using any of these techniques will generate what Google most likely will define as "excessive reciprocal links" and what Matt Cutts, who is the final arbiter in these matters, will probably consider search-engine spam.

Rule Three: Always, always keep control of critical link decision making processes firmly in your own hands. Specifically, never allow automated systems or third-party service providers to solicit or accept link exchanges for your site. Never establish a link without visiting the prospective link partner's site yourself and evaluating it for relevancy and quality. Don't forget that Google considers "no-brainer links" (i.e. links initiated computer-to-computer without human intervention) "excessive."

And if you do decide to use a link-management system to streamline your link-building program and automate the time-consuming "housekeeping" inherent in organizing and maintaining links, make absolutely, positively sure the application you select is editor-based.

Editor-based link-management solutions like LinksManager are the polar opposite of full-duplex linking systems. Rather than make the important linking decisions for you like full-duplex systems, editor-based applications give you more time to personally and intelligently make those choices by seamlessly doing the grunt work of manually checking for dead links, reformatting pages every time a link is added or deleted, blacklisting irrelevant or improper link requests and much, much more.

If you've read the Google Guidelines and come to the conclusion that you must choose between having a skeletal links page and a good PR or a hearty, traffic-generating set of links pages and a lower PR, the good news is that you're wrong. You CAN have it ALL. A great PageRank and as many high quality, relevant links as you want.

All you have to do is follow the Golden Rules.