The first thing you need to do is learn a little about link building yourself before you go shopping. You don’t need to be a link building expert, but you need to understand how the process works to be an informed buyer. You can learn what you need to know right here on this site. You may want to read these posts if you are not already familiar with these topics:

• How to get Links to Your Website
  
• Seven Keys to SEO Link Building Success
  
• Why One Way Backlinks?

You should now have a pretty good understanding of the kinds of linking and the benefits of one way links to your site. Let’s start by listing some of the things you should avoid in link building services.

FFA Sites and Link Farms – These don’t work, at least not long term and participating in them can actually harm your website rankings. FFA is short for “free for all” and are sites with thousands and thousands of links with no real content. Link farms are similar and the search engines may penalize your rankings if you have a lot of links from these types of sites.

Comment Spam – Posting relevant comments on blogs is a valid link building tactic, but posting junk comments just to get links is useless. Unfortunately, there are  services out there that use comment spam as their primary strategy.

Reciprocal Links – There is noting wrong with recipricol links, but if you get nothing but recipricol (or two way links) you are not getting a lot of milage out of your links. Two way links help a little but you really need one way links to get good search engine rankings. Some link building services concentrate only in getting two way links and if those are used they should be only part of your
link strategy.

Buying Links – Google hates sites that sell links and sites that buy them. If you buy links, especially high page rank links you risk the wrath og Google.  Even beyond the risk of being punished by Google buying links is by nature a very short term tactic. When you buy links you are paying for them every month and as the bills add up as some point you are going to want to stop paying for them. When you stop paying you abruptly lose the links.

We have covered what to avoid when looking for link building services. In the next article we will take a looks at the positive aspects and what you really want to get out of this kind of service.