Webmasters have been looking for more effective ways to link bait and build up their links profile in the recent years especially after Google has put their focuses on quality inbound links. The following illustrates some of the poor linking strategies employed by most Webmasters nowadays and discuss why these links are considered dead as they do nothing and may even harm the websites.

The biggest mistake in link building made by most Webmasters is that they tend to submit their websites to tons of directories for a hefty sum of money. This is not efficient because not all the links will be picked up by the search engines, in my experience, less than 40% of such links are indexed by the bots generally. Furthermore, they do not bring in any traffic for the site. The only directories that worth the submission are Yahoo and DMOZ. They bring in traffic for the listed websites.

Link exchange is another area that needs to be carefully assessed before any placement. It has been a trend for most Webmasters to set up a link page just to exchange links. This is certainly not recommended especially when the page becomes a Link Farm when it contains too many outgoing links.

Not all link exchanges are bad, links that lead to relevant and quality content is excellent both in attracting traffic and gaining page importance. For example, a link labeled as 'Webmasters Guidelines' is totally relevant when it appears in a website review post.

Most Webmasters forums allow signatures in the members' posting as it will attract traffic to their sites. These links tend to be misused by the new members by putting up their advertisement rather than providing useful information about their sites or personal profiles.

Most new Webmasters also tend to join the forums just to spam their website links all over the place. This is a very bad practice as other members will not only avoid the site listed but may also blacklist such sites. In this case, these spam links are worst than dead links.. they are classified as harmful links.

Forums are actually good places to build links if proper techniques were adopted, such as providing useful information and advices over time and members will start to visit your sites in your signature.

To conclude, a good link building strategy will not only increase the page importance but will also attract targeted traffic to the respective page. Placing dead links do not add value to the website and also waste valuable resources.