Different strategies for search engine optimization have been developed over the last few years. One strategy that always comes back as a response when asking what works, is to build additional back links to a website that needs to be promoted. This advice is old (old in Internet days) but still very valid. Until Google.com finds a different way of calculating the search engine results the back links will still play a big role and no webmaster should ignore them. The assumption still is that if a site has valuable content or services to offer that other webmasters will link to that particular site. The higher the number of links becomes the more value is being allocated to that website by Google. Google pretty much allows the Internet community to decide or better - help deciding what is good and that it should show up high in search results.

Since this fact became public knowledge people are eager to follow these 'unwritten rules' of Google's search index. Link farms, online link directories and other link collection type of sites have been populating the Internet in increased numbers since then. What the value is of these sites needs to be determined. Plain link farms do not carry any real value for the user. All they are really there is to help to increase the number of backlinks to a site and nothing else. There is no value content-wise whatsoever. Link Directories carry a little more value, but overall the usage of link directories is steadily going down. Search engines are stepping up and provide better value and offer more convenience for the user at the same time. Other websites use their value to sell text links. Users buy these links and basically pay for the link and the hope to gain a higher Page Rank from it. This can work up to a certain limit. It becomes problematic if the seller of the text links stretches the limits on how many outgoing links a single page will carry. 5 - 10 links are probably most common. However - sometimes you run into websites and web pages that carry 20-30 of these outgoing links. The value of these kind of links is questionable. There is no technical reason for a page to carry that many outgoing links in 95% of cases. It's not exactly clear at this point if search engines degrade the value of inbound links coming from those page already. If they don't - the day that they will put less value on those links is probably very near. So, users buying text links should verify that the pages the link will be placed on do not carry too many outgoing links to keep the value of this link alive.