By now you’ve no doubt heard all sorts of clever ways to acquire in-bound links to your website. Links are obviously important since they're a major factor in Google's ranking algorithm which determines how high your site ranks for particular keywords.

There are many ways to generate links back to your site, including: Cross-Linking, Reciprocal linking, Link farms, Submitting to directories, Requesting links from other sites, Link-baiting, Social bookmarking, Buying links from other sites, Press releases, and Forum spam. Some of these techniques may be perfectly acceptable, while other may get you banned from Google for sure. That’s why its critical that you understand what Google thinks about them before you implement them or hire someone else to implement them for you.

Here’s what Google has to say about hiring an SEO company when it comes to unnatural link-building or other aggressive techniques designed to manipulate their search engine algorithms:

"Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index... Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.

While Google makes it clear that some techniques violate their guidelines, they also make it clear that there’s nothing inherently wrong with acquiring links, as long as its done the right way, using acceptable techniques…

"In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."

Google isn’t afraid to explain to people how their algorithm works, including the importance of in-bound links. They even advise people to make sure that other relevant sites are linked to them, since that is how their search engine spider finds new links.

When choosing a link-building strategy, always keep in mind that Google only counts natural links when determining the important of your site. At least, that’s what they strive for. Think about the method by which you plan to acquire links and try to look at it from Google’s point of view. Is the link you are acquiring being gained due to the quality of the content on your site? If you are paying for the link, or linking back to yourself in some other way, this is not what Google considers a natural link. Using these methods to acquire links may work in the short term, but if Google discovers them, there is a risk of getting penalized, or losing any benefit from the link by having the PageRank flow shut off from those links to your site.

In the end, it’s your site’s content that will determine the overall success of your site. Focusing on your content is what will entice other site owners to link to you. Once they link to you, your site’s PageRank will increase, causing your site to rank higher in the search results. This in turn gives your content more visibility, which generates even more back-links… it’s a wonderful cycle once it gets kicked into gear.