The general consensus among the SEO community is that backlinks are very important to seo and improving your page rank. So, the more backlinks the better you ask? No, not exactly…I’ll tell you why.

The search engines pay attention to how your backlinks in general look, how relevant they are, how natural they seem to appear, and the page rank of the other sites linking to you. Basically, if your links look purchased or over optimized (manipulated), the search engines notice this.

The last thing you want is 100 overly optimized links with that ALL have the same exact anchor text with the keywords you’re trying to compete on. So if all you’re backlinks look something like “mysite.com – cheapest holiday packages to Jamaica”, the search engines may very well penalize you for this. The reason they do this is because essentially you’re trying to manipulate them and they don’t like that one bit.

So in general, don’t participate in dodgy link exchanges or programs unless you want to suffer and get blacklisted. Try not to purchase a bunch of generic links either. Go out there and manually find relevant and quality sites to link to. This will appear more natural to the search engines and you will gain some good link juice in return.