There are many myths that surround search engine optimisation and many different views on how to build links into your website. It is no secret that building links into your website is a good way to rise through the rankings and strengthening your website in the search engines. However there are so many things that are just not true.

1. Google only Counts the first 100 links on a webpage: A few years ago people noticed that only about 100 links’ on a webpage where being counted by Google. So they thought that Google didn’t like webpage’s that had over 100 links on a webpage. This was true but the reason for this was that Google stopped caching the page after a certain amount of kilobytes. So any links that were after the cut of point were not being counted, Google has now increased the size of the cache due to larger WebPages in modern websites. I would say that 100 links in any webpage is too many just for a usability standpoint.

2. Links from other websites can harm yours: This is another myth if this was the case if would be easy for your competitors to add a link to spammy websites to make your website suffer. Only websites that you are linking to can harm you, more on that in a moment.

3. Having External links in your website are bad: People used to think that it was bad to have too many external links on a webpage as this will dilute your strength as its better to have incoming links and not external links. This can be true if you are linking to bad website neighbourhoods. However Google has stated that if you are linking to authority websites that are related to the content to your website and will add visitor value then this can be good. As this shows that you know what you are talking about.

4. Links form high Pagerank websites are best: This is a myth this is only really beneficial to website that are already have a high PageRank. It is uncommon to find a high PageRank website linking to a PageRank 2 it just looks unnatural. If you are looking for links you should not be concerned about PageRank you should look for WebPages that are relevant to your content and that the visitors will find valuable.

5. Links from .edu websites have greater strength: The reason this was thought to be true was that traditionally .edu and .gov website are strong websites anyway and are an authority within there industry. So receiving a link from here carries more weight. As Matt Cutts said a link is a link. Every link is treated the same, however a link will then be put through a filter and may be devaluated depending on many factors.