Links are one of the most important aspects of an ongoing SEO campaign and
are one of the areas where many struggle to conduct their own SEO campaign.
While getting good links is important, ensuring that you avoid bad links is
equally important, although obviously you can’t always help it if another page
offers you a “bad link”.

A Bad Link Profile

In reality, bad links are something of a misnomer. After all, the search engines
realise that you may not necessarily have control over all of your inbound
links. As a result of this, your web page is unlikely to suffer as a result
of one or two bad links. However, if your entire link profile is made up of
links from bad neighbourhoods then you could pay the price.

FFA Link Pages And Link Farms

FFA, or Free For All, link sites allow absolutely anybody to submit their
page information and receive a link. There are many reasons why this is a bad
idea. For a start off, the linking page is unlikely to be considered relevant
to the topic of your own and it will almost certainly have a large number of
links on that one page. Both of these cause search engines to greatly devalue
a link.

Avoiding Bad Links

Links from any irrelevant page are much less advantageous than those from
relevant pages. In none SEO terms, a link from a highly regarded and relevant
page will almost certainly drive some highly targeted visitors to your pages
but you would have to be lucky to get visitors from a page based on an entirely
different topic.