Are you white hat or black hat? White hat SEOs build inbound links at a steady pace and focus on quality, rather than quantity. Black hat SEOs take the opposite route and funnel in as many links as possible in a bid to create brand awareness.

They don’t care if their activities yield poor quality networks and sometimes offend other webmasters in the process. Are you guilty of the following poor link building procedures?

Directory Spamming

1. Blast your site to 10000 cheesy paid-inclusion directories (rating $5 a pop) that send a whopping zero traffic.

Forum Spamming

2. Rattle off 500 URLs in your sig file. It screams “I’m desperate”

3. Post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area. Doofuses kept sending viagra URLs to my radionics forum that I implemented rules preventing urls until 50 SENSIBLE posts were made.

4. Fire off “me too” posts to amass your post count. It gets worse when you accompany each bit of nonesense with a link-rich signature file.

5. Create a phoney debate on the best [GREATGADGET], where [GREATGADGET] is an cool doodad that you sell. Then, you intelligently use the same IP address create another forum account and banter back, raving about how ubercool your own site is.

6. Create 20 accounts per day at new forums asking people the same question about viagra even at AIDS Awareness websites. Of course, you don’t forget to post your 500URL sig file.

7. Revive forum threads that ended a decade ago just to plug link to your semi-related website on cialis.

Blog Spam

8. Judiciously signing blog comments with spammy keywords. It’s okay to sign up as Sex God or SEO Dude. That’s cool. But when you sign as “Cialis Viagra Levitra Wholesale”, I reach for the shotgun.

9. Commenting how your secret eBook marketing methods made you 500Million a year- on the FeedNigeria charity blog.

10. Creating a 10,000-strong blog empire all on the same webhost/IP using RSS2Blog and linking them to your mainsite. You can almost hear the google engineers cackling before they push the button that tanks your pagerank