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Link building is one of the effective ways to gain maximum traffic to your website and enhance visibility. Having said that, it is important to remember that all inbound links are not equal, which means that not all links actually increase your visibility. In order to create quality links, it is important to understand the differences between good and bad links, which can help differentiate between them and finally avoid the bad ones. Following are some of the major differences between good and bad links.

• Relevance of links: One of the major points of difference between good and bad links is that the former consists of links between relevant websites while the latter is one between irrelevant sites. For example, if you have a cookery website, then links to cooking equipment and other related fields would constitute good links while those to irrelevant sites like cars, electronics etc would constitute bad links.
• Reciprocal Links and Directory Links: More often than not, people feel that by creating reciprocal links between two sites, they are increasing the traffic into their site, without realizing that search engines do not take kindly to such link building. Reciprocal links create a bad impression about your website in the minds of search engines and are therefore not good links. Similarly, a directory is a place that provides links to many sites, without really looking into the authenticity of the site and is therefore not a reliable link.
• Link Farms and Link Schemes: In each of these cases, links are created to increase traffic, without really looking into whether or not such linking makes sense. In link farms, websites link each and every page with every other page in an attempt to increase the traffic and such linking has no relevance whatsoever to the topic. In a webring, linkages are between thematic pages, which create a circular structure, although it’s still not really useful. In link schemes, links are created with the special purpose of increasing page rank and manipulating it, which could again be looked upon as spam links, those that search engines avoid. Therefore, while linking, care should be taken to avoid such linking tactics.
• Reliability: When looking for good links, you should always link with sites that are reliable, respectable and have a good history while bad links are created from sites with no or little history and the ones that rank low with respect to respectability or reliability.
• Dilemma with paid links: While payment for endorsement is an age old concept that works in the offline business world, it does not create the same returns in the online world. In other words, like directories, paid links can be created whether or not a website believes in you and are therefore completely unreliable.
• Fewer Outbound Links: While choosing sites for creating your inbound links, always choose one with the fewest outbound links apart from ensuring that the site is reliable, popular and has a good standing. Fewer outbound links mean that the company endorses only the best and therefore, people will be interested. This in turn will increase your web traffic.

Creating good linkages for your website is easy provided you keep the above factors in mind and only create good links, which will increase traffic, reduce bounce rate and ensure profitability in the long run. Always keep in mind that quality over quantity is the key to successful link building.