An artificial link structure is a way of linking websites together in a method designed purely with the aim of getting higher search engine rankings.

A few years ago, artificial link structures were popular and successful.

I interviewed a webmaster who owned a cluster of 20 or 30 sites all about different kinds of posters. The sites were linked together using multiple links.

The sites ranked well and he was earning about $5,000 a month in affiliate commissions.

Unfortunately for him, those golden days didn't last. Eventually, all the sites in the cluster were penalized by Google. I don't think any of those sites exist any more.

These days, the search engines are smarter. Excessive crosslinking is likely to get your sites penalized by Google and especially by Yahoo!, which is stricter than Google.

Some affiliates now do tricky things such as getting domains registered around the world in the names of friends and relatives, so that their artificial link structures are not obvious.

For long-term success, build a genuinely useful, interesting website that people WANT to link to. If you do that, you'll automatically have a natural link structure. Here are some other factors which seem to ring alarm bells, and what to do about them:

• Having a large percentage of reciprocal links could ring alarm bells. Good, popular sites have lots of one-way links. Try to get one-way links to your site, for example, by writing articles for other sites. In my experience, reciprocal links are still very helpful, but make sure they're not your only linking strategy.
  
• Having identical anchor text on all links to your site looks artificial. When sites link to you, try to persuade them to use a variety of key phrases in the anchor text (the words people click on). One way to do this is to provide the HTML code for them to paste into their sites.
• Sudden huge increases in backlinks (inbound links) look artificial. People doing something unusual get huge surges in links. Get links to your site steadily, a few at a time, in a natural way.
  
•  Links to "link farms" are dangerous. Link farms create pages of links which are cut and pasted into large clusters of sites. To search engines, these are "bad neighborhoods". Also, it's not a good idea to link to sites which have huge directories indiscriminately linking to anyone. Link to good, useful sites related to your topic.
  
• It's possible that getting lots of site-wide links could cause you trouble. "Site-wide links" are links which appear on all pages of a site, linking to your site. That's an unnatural pattern, but probably less harmful than some of the other factors. A wonderfully generous man is linking to this site from more than 2,000 pages on his site. You probably want to avoid having a large number of friends who do that.

If all this seems terribly complicated, take heart from the fact that the search engines' ultimate goal is to deliver good search results. Build a useful, interesting, high-quality site and you've taken a huge leap in the direction of search engine success.


Search engine tips

For excellent search engine tips updated every month, the best source on the Net is Stephen Mahaney's Unfair Advantage Book On Winning The Search Engine Wars. This is the source the professionals use.