Or maybe I should say the cost of it should you get it wrong!

One of the most talked about topic in the blogosphere as well from the Internet marketing point of view is back links. What are back links and why are they so valuable that there a literally hundreds thousands of e-books and site dedicated to it.

For simplicity’s sake a back link is a link from one site to another. So if you have a website and having viewed it I liked it I would go off to my site and mention it with a link back to you – hence a link back and that is how Google intended it to be and its how they like to see it. And should you go about it the right way Uncle Google rewards you by giving you (your site/blog) a page rank

But you have to be very careful with links out of your site though. Its all nice giving each other back links but if you get the balance wrong you could be in for a nasty little surprise. Too many outbound links – or should I say to much love back – can cost you your rank.

I found out the hard way – but for me its not a biggie because my site is based on affiliate marketing so I have more outbound links than inbound. But for those of you that are blogging and building up rankings and aiming for Google first page this should really matter to you. Be proportionate with your link backs – by all means give some love back but be economical about it.

Here is a little trick you can use to limit the damage – (only apply this to your outbound affiliate links) not your commenter’s site/blog or those you have to link back to though. What you do is when you put up an affiliate link is you would add “rel=nofollow” at the end of it. For example if my affiliate link is http://affiliatescorner.com I would link to it thus <a target=”_blank” href=”http://affiliatescorner.com” rel=”nofollow” >Affiliates Corner</a>

Technically, rel=”nofollow” does not mean the search engines won’t spider the page. They will follow the link, spider the page and count the link as a backlink. What rel=”nofollow” means is “don’t trust the link”, i.e. don’t pass PageRank/TrustRank, etc.

The robots meta tag “nofollow” is different, and really does mean “don’t follow links from this page”, and has nothing to do with backlinks or PageRank.

What that will do simply tell the search engines robot/crawler not to follow the link through to the target site/blog terms of page rank value – in turn that will stop your link back from being diluted and give you a good page rank. Oh by the way Affiliates Corner is my affiliate product review blog and that’s the site I lost the page rank on. But like I said it still ranks high in search results (#1 for a number of key phrases) and on page one for most other keywords

In conclusion: You have done a lot of hard work and earned your back links, which in turn have given you a good page rank – with the new status Google looks at your site and gives it importance and thus returns it well in search results – you owe it to yourself to safe guard that. Be wise, be economical and be profitable with your back links efforts – that is the true value so don’t let it cost you instead – all the best.

P.S: I have started to implement the nofollow tag to the outbound affiliate links on all my new sites and will also work on at Affiliates Corner as and when time permits – lol erm they do say practice what you preach