STOP!

Unfortunately, these programs not only aren’t likely to help, they might kill your site’s link popularity.

Why they don’t help
All of the major search engines use automated processes to weed out "identical" (or very similar) pages. This was done primarily to curb the abuse of automated doorway page generators and similar tools. If your link gets added to the index at all, it is likely to be weighted with very low importance.

Why they can hurt
It has been widely reported in the search engine optimization community that in 2000, the world’s most popular search engine, Google, started a process to remove links programs participants from their index. Other search engines have announced that they are doing similar things. Even if the operator of a links program tells you otherwise, you may be on rolling the dice with your traffic if you are involved in such a program

Doing It Right
Your safest bet ticket to link popularity (and the page rank and traffic that come with it) is to get it the old fashioned way — earn it. The tried-and-true methods are as follows:

Personal Exchanges
Everybody gets those automated little form e-mails "I’ve linked to your site, please link to mine". They’re annoying, presumptive, and many reek of "link farm". Spend a little time each day actually going out and looking for sites that are a good match to yours, and then send a real, personal, friendly e-mail to the owner of the site enquiring about whether they’d like to exchange links. If they say no, or don’t reply, move on. Not everybody will be interested, and being a persistent pest won’t help.

Adding Value
Of course, if you put good valuable articles and information relating to your field of expertise on your site, you won’t have to ask for link exchanges — people will be add links to your quality information. This is the way the web is supposed to work, of course.

Manage Your Own Links
In the article mentioned at the top, I discuss a little bit about how to learn to structure your site for link popularity. A great idea to build on this is to create a new site, on a separate domain, and on that site maintain a page of links to each and every page of your site that you want in the index. This is essentially the same as a "site map" you would add to your site, except you are building it on a separate domain. Be sure that you include the keywords you’d like to target for each page in the text for that page’s link. Add a link to this page from your main site, and watch the link popularity of both sites improve. For extra points, explain what you are doing to the link partners you have found, and get them to do the same thing, and exchange links for those pages as well.

Patience is a Virtue
Search engine optimization is not a route to instant gratification. Don’t expect to see results overnight. But if you take just a few initial steps now, and spend a few minutes each day working to build links, you should begin seeing dramatic improvement in your search engine traffic within two or three months. If you stay with it, it will only improve…

This same PageRank is used to weight a page’s placement in Google’s search engine listings.

Since Google is one of the best sources of qualified traffic on the net, it is important to understand how your site is ranked via pagerank. The gory details are explained in this article, along with at least an approximation of the forumla used to calculate the rank.

The abbreviated version is that PageRank is an indicator of “Link Popularity” — you gan PageRank as a percentage of the PageRank of sites that link to you, divided by the number of outbound links on the site linking to you. So if you are linked to by a page with a very high rank and few other links, you get a substantial boost to your PageRank.

This means is a link from another page increases your site’s rank, as long as the site linking to you isn’t essentially a “link farm”.

There is a PageRank for each page on the site, and a PageRank for the site itself, based on the internal pages and how they are linked to from each other and from the outside world.

The maximum amount of PageRank for a site increases as the number of unique pages in the site increases. “Cookie Cutter” pages, however, can cause the PageRank of the page or the entire site to be penalized.

How this maximum PageRank is applied to the site is dependant on how the pages in the site link to each other. The article mentioned above gives example scenarios with explanations, as well as a calculator to allow you to play “what if” with different variations. Ther site also covers a lot of potential “gotchas” and esoteric issues that can be important if you’re really aiming to maximize your site’s Google placement.