Link Scheme is a concept that you link somewhere solely for the financial benefits rather than the usefulness of the visitors.

Basically the role of a link is to recommend a site that you feel worthy and it would be useful for the users who visit your website. But it is unethical if you make your visitors to reach your website by violating the search engine guidelines that is against the web law!

First let us see what can determine whether you are involved in a link scheme:

If you are linking your site for any reason rather than recommending it as useful to your visitors, it means you are in some sort of link scheme practices. Some of them are below:

• If you buy or sell links with an intention of passing page rank, then you are in link scheme.
• If you use any illegal services or automated programs to gain links to your website, you are in link scheme.
• If you create several websites or web pages just for the reason to link it to another web page or site, you are link scheming.
• If you create links with over optimized anchor text in the articles, blogs, press releases that is distributed and placed on other sites, then you are in a link scheme.
• If you are linking to some website solely for getting a link back, then you are in a lick scheme.
• If you buy native ads or advertising for the purpose of getting payment for the articles with links in order to get page rank, it means you are involved in link schemes.
• If you are campaigning for article marketing or guest posting in a large scale with anchor-text keyword links, you are in a link scheme.

In all the above practices you are attaining links that recommends your site only because of increasing the PR and commercial profits. It is really a bad manner and Google like search engines can easily detect it and penalize your site that causes adverse effects.

What is Bad neighborhood and how to check?

Bad – Creating links only for the purpose of increasing your Ranking or PR and having bad neighborhood which has a group of websites that are inter-linked and that does not obey the webmaster guidelines. If you want to check about your neighborhood sites that enter the following in your search box:

“ related:www.yourwebsite.com “

This shows the list of sites that Google displays as related to your website. If you see sites that are irrelevant to your website, then it means you are having a bad neighborhood.

Good – create a link in order to guide the visitors that your website will be useful.

Summary:

• You can identify the link schemes by checking how you are linked to websites; either by recommendation or for any other reason of promoting yourself.
• Each and every link you create on your site will find who you are and what your website is all about.
• It is advisable not to create links to the website that seem to be spamming or having bad neighborhoods as it will adversely affect your website ranking.