We all know already that link popularity has great influence on a website's search engine ranking, but the way most webmasters build links may end up hurting their website in the search results.

The most common way of building links has been seeking out reciprocal links, directory listings, forum posting and then article marketing but with Google's constant improvements this is no longer enough and if you do it the wrong way it can become harmful.

If you really want to step above of the crowds you might want to start considering press releases and paid links. For those with very small budgets I would recommend to buy at least 2 - 3 links from high page rank sites that are related to your site's content. This will add huge value to your website.

Now don't get me wrong reciprocal links are still valuable, but don't abuse! And only from quality websites. The same for article marketing, these can still affect link popularity and the ability of a website to rank on search engines, but you MUST make sure that the articles are interesting to the reader. This means your article must be good which will lead people to bookmark the page. Social bookmarks can add value to a web page that is linked in the bookmark, because "a person" has voted on the referenced URL or article. That is a very powerful addition to Google's algorithm arsenal.

Link Baits is a clever seo strategy that consists of building pages that people for sure will want to link to. The most common link baits offer some kind of tool like a game, a puzzle, a paint color selector or just any java-based application that does one thing or another.

So here is the important stuff. Where are your links? What kind of links are they? Are your links all structured the same? Do they come in the same format (articles, press releases)? Here is the one important to our discussion. Do they all appear on the same kind(s) of website?