If you have a web site that is getting much traffic, you will sooner or later be approached by someone who will want to link to your website and have a link from yours to theirs. It has been widely reported that this will help you get better positioning in search engines. This is and is not true.
While having someone link to your site might drive traffic if they visit your site from a link on that site, having links that are not relevant to the content on the linked sites on your site may actually harm your ranking on the search engines.
Search engine positionint on sites like Google are based on a point system. This system adds or subtracts points from you for various reasons. For example it used to be that if you hid keywords on your page repeated over and over, you moved up in the search engines on a relevance basis. This practice over time became known as a form of “spamming the search engines”. When you have hidden text on your page (hidden text is when you make the text the same color as the background so it is invisible to the user) you lose points in the rankings and move down the list.
Search engines have been made very intelligent by...