Tips you should use before linking to another website
Links offers/demands

Linking to other websites with good to excellent content have several  advantages:

● You are offering your visitors information that complements your website - and they appreciate it.
● Visitors come back again and again since they know that THRU your website they can find a lot of new and useful information without much effort on your part.
● You won't have to expend a lot of time or money researching or having someone else research information for new pages in your website.
● You won't need to expend a lot of time or money designing or having someone else design new pages with valuable content for your website.
● When you find content on another site that complements yours, you can ask that site's owner permission to copy part of that content (or an entire article) in order to add it to your site. Make sure to let them know that you will give them full credit for the content and a link to their site as well. Chances are that they will be more than happy to provide the permission you are requesting.

Link to websites that offer:

● Valuable and interesting information for your site visitors.
● Professional looking pages.
● It is visitor as well as search engine friendly.

Many benefits can be obtained by linking to other websites, however it would be irresponsible on our part if we encouraged website owners to link to other websites without cautioning them first about who NOT to link to and why.

A link in your website pointing to another website (even if you are exchanging links) is counted as a vote of confidence or recommendation in favor of that website. If you recommend a website that is spamming the Search Engines  your website could be penalized for it and will probably get a lower ranking in the search engines.

There are many ways in which some websites spam the Search Engines in order to improve their position in the search results. However, websites that are using these tactics can be penalized or even banned for life from Search Engines since they waist up their resources,  lowers their search quality, gives them a bad image and make them less functional since it is much harder for web visitors to find what they are looking for.
 

This is a list of the most popular offenders:

● Doorway pages
● Page redirects
● No content
● Link farms
● Over submitting
● E-mail spamming
● Code swapping
● Meta spam
● Invisible keywords/key-phrases in the content of the page
● Cloaking

The good news is that most websites do not get involved in unethical practices used for tricking the search engines but since some do, you should check out  websites first before linking to them.

● Needless to say, you should not link to websites that are competing for the same business your are in. You do not want to give away your clients to them. There are a lot of websites with good to excellent relevant content that can complement your website without hurting it.