Google recognises that link building is still a part of the trade and acknowledges this, but there are ways to go about building up your inbound link count that are legitimate – put simply, Google doesn’t mind link building so long as you’re not spamming, or black-hatting as it is colloquially known. Not sure about what Google considers to be a black-hat practice? Here’s what Google recommends:

1. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
2. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
3. Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
4. Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Google does well to paraphrase the above for points in a comment made on the official Google Webmaster blog:

*Our general advice is: Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy.

Every “by-the-book” SEO knows and understands the quality guidelines, but there are still a lot of companies out there who love nothing better than to turn the internet into a spammy scrap-yard with their exploits. In light of these wonderful men, women and… uhhhh…. Robots who continue to abuse the loopholes in search I would like to give my personal thank you for some good lolz over the years. To the readers of this post, whether you’re an SEO guru or a novice, here’s a little bit of trivial link-fodder to lighten up your day:

1. The  blog comment-bot that barely speaks English – Every time I log into the Websalad blog to moderate comments, I’m always given a cheap laugh or two by the same spammer types who try ever so hard to make me hit the “approve” button. Thanks for “enjoying” our articles and letting us know that you will “bull-whip it” as often as you can…

   
   
   

2. The pointless post – It feels like millions of my brain cells die every time I set my eyes on an abysmal post topic, often Twitter related, adding little to no value to anyone reading it and at times boasting a hearty following of social media drones – all of them reverberating the same response over-and-over…. To this day, I still cannot believe that people are making thousands off Twitter “how-to” publications, but I might save that rant for another time.

   
   
   

3. The internal link harvest – get ready, the HTML files are fertile and their links are a-grown’! The link harvester always gives me a bit of a chuckle. Here’s one hilarious *example I came across… What is it that they sell? Chocolate cake…? Try and guess:

   
   
   

We’ve only shown a few examples, but there is a lot out there. Do you have any hilarious SEO spam examples to share? Drop us a comment and share them – we love a laugh or two!

Sources:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/building-link-based-popularity.html
http://www.seofailblog.com/internal-linking-fail

1. Keep your SEO tactics to yourself – All it takes is one bitter blog reader, affiliate or competitor to issue a complaint to Google detailing the nature of your SEO tactics. For example, John Chow (author of JohnChow.com) – a blogger of considerable notoriety, openly discussed on his blog how he asked bloggers to link back to his blog with an anchored keyword. The end result? Google laid down the hammer and it took him over a year to regenerate a decent Page Rank.
2. Don’t over-optimize your site with target keywords – Google indexes everything according to relevance, and not only this, it also has filters in place to nullify any keywords or phrases that have been aggressively targeted in landing pages or in meta tags. How to avoid this? Be liberal. Make your content relevant, and ensure that the application of your keywords isn’t too over-bearing. Take an outsider’s perspective – if someone can read your text and easily identify and keyword repetition, Google most certainly will act the same way. The key is to work with Google, and not against it.
3. Don’t sculpt your Page Rank using tag attributes – Namely, the ‘rel=nofollow’ tag attribute, Google has since decided to disregard the value of this tag and for quite a valid reason. It was being used to nullify link authority and re-direct link juice to target landing pages – known more formally as ‘page rank scultping’. Some companies still choose to manipulate this tactic, but we recommend that it is something you should avoid – this technique is tired and highly temperamental.
4. Artificial link profiles – Google filters out sites if their link profiles match any of the following criteria:
   • Links are too close together, or similar links recur through your page frequently.
   • The anchor text of all of your links is identical (they all re-direct to the same landing page).
   • You’re links aren’t deep enough to other pages
   • Links are low quality and irrelevant to the site content
   • If there are sidebar and footer links – these rank poorly.
   • Too many reciprocal links

Don’t try and manipulate Google’s search algorithm, as you will be quickly identified and neutralized!

Right, so it sounds a little bit scarier than it actually is, but it’s not worth taking the chance.

5. Finally, a common sense practice – Don’t use SEO to promote spammy websites! Adhere to the guidelines, and work with the Google algorithm.