When you do it the right way, the results can be amazing in regards to both increased rankings and traffic...

It's not just the site or the link text that matters, the actual page that links to your site matters, too.

Most naturally occurring inbound links point to home pages, which give them more votes in the form of credibility and power.

Receiving a link from another site's home page is more valuable than a link from an internal page, which can often contain spammer or junk affiliate links.

So does that mean its a waste of time as an affiliate marketer to be generating back links to your website?

How can affiliate links reduce your ranking with the search engines?

Search engines watch how fast new links to a site appear as a way to detect and penalize search engine spam.

If too many new links appear in too short a timeframe with identical anchor text emerge...

Red flags would be triggered and the site maybe penalized, banned or experience a sudden decline in rankings.

You really got to be careful...about which affiliate links the search engines can follow as these links influence your ranking, for better or worse.

Some affiliates may also operate as affiliates for other merchants.

They may link to everything on the same page: get rich quick scams; credit card offers; home-based business opportunities, you get the idea...

Links from these pages cover so many topics they dilute your inbound links context and that won't help your ranking.

The bottom line is link quality, not quantity, that counts, so the plan is to build cautious and go slow.

Link growth that leads to increased rankings and traffic can be realized but watch out for Link Farms.

Link farms main purpose is to generate back links to other sites within a group in order to build rankings.

But link farms...usually provide little or no useful content and this is another clue that maybe suspect or mass-manufactured...

These sites form a network, the aim is for each page to link to other pages within this group, which is seen by the search engines as spamming.

The search engines can easily identify link farms and will penalize your website for having an incoming link from a link farm!

Then you have to watch out for banned pages.

If a page has been banned and it has a back link to your website, the link can actually reduce your ranking with the search engines.

How do you find out if a website is banned by the search engines?

Tip: If you've installed the Google ToolBar, look closely at the color of the page rank indicator for the page in question.

If the page has been banned, the google page rank bar shows an empty bar which is grey in colour.

This is different from a new page with a zero page rank because the page rank bar is white in color...

Building back links to your website, in order to have a significant effect on your website ranking, your links should be from web pages that have content relevant to the content on your website.

Linking from websites on niches not related to yours will often not necessarily hurt your ranking, but it will certainly not improve...