Consistent linking is important for getting good rankings and therefore free and organic traffic from Google. Consistent links show that your site is well-liked by users, and it also shows that your site is relevant.

Want to know a secret? You can use consistent linking to tell Google that your site is well-liked by users, even when nobody knows about it. But how do you do that?

By simulating the traffic and link patterns of a site that's getting links organically—even if yours isn't!

A site that gets links "naturally" well get some links when if first comes on the scene. Then every time it adds content, if people like it, it will get a few more. Then the new link rate slacks off a bit until new content shows up and it gets a little more link love. And on and on and...you get the picture.

Google is a smart little black box and it pays attention to what's happening with your site. It sees the rhythm, understands what it means, and shows you its love in the rankings. You'll get an A+ on your Google report card and you'll get good traffic.

However, Google isn't so smart that it can't be fooled, more on that in a minute.

Many people who buy links don't do it the smart way. They get a steady stream of incoming links. Well, this can look a little funny. Steady links aren't natural; they're not the way things work organically. So it doesn't hurt to vary how many links you have coming in to your site from week to week. Some weeks you may actually want to have fewer links. A good time to buy or otherwise create more is when you add new content, because that fits the pattern of what Google knows about organically linked-to sites.

What doesn't look good is when you decide that you're paying too much for links, or don't need them anymore because you've got a good ranking now, and so decide to drop them. This isn't going to help you at all. As soon as everybody's favorite search engine sees this massive drop-off in link love, it's going to know exactly what's been going on. And it's not going to be very happy.

This can also happen with social bookmarking links, when you've depended heavily on creating those kinds of links in order to get noticed and loved by Google (and the other search engines. Yes, they do still exist. They're just not nearly as important as Google is, these days.)

Now if you want to just let your site die, that's another thing entirely. But you might want to remove any links on your tanked site, that link to other sites you're still giving attention to. After all, you're about to put your tanked site into the realm of "bad neighborhoods." It's not certain that any site you link to from it will be put in the same category—but why take that risk?