Backlinks are still the most important factor that affects your search engine ranking. One of the scariest things to get as a webmaster or seo optimizer is to get a manual penalty imposed on the site. These issues can be resolved but it is always better to fix these issues before they come to Google’s attention. To do this, it is best to have a regular link profile analysis and then check the guidelines against your links for violations. Here are three of the most common guidelines that are violated:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

This is the top for a reason. When you can’t get links a lot of people think they can buy their way to better ranking. This can happen in any company. The easiest way is to check each link and see if they have a lot of posts with outbound links. In addition you can sometimes tell from the domain name.

Excessive link exchanges

Link exchanges are not as popular as they used to be but are still considered problematic. A good example of this is any site in any industry that acquires links from partners who also link back to the blog just for the sake of links, and nothing else that may add value from an SEO perspective.

Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links

Guest posting is also considered as bad as buying links, so avoid any consistent campaign of guest posting in exchange for links. Article marketing is easy to identify and fortunately can be reversed quite easily.