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Avoid building backlinks on sites that have a lot of spam .i.e. high page rank blogs with no comment moderation.

Joining blog networks is now known to be a very effective way of getting your site penalized.

Even if you focus exclusively on high quality backlinks, you can still find yourself penalized. When a sites backlinks have been acquired naturally, they tend to come from a variety of different sources. This means that they will include both dofollow and nofollow backlinks and they will come from both high and low page rank websites. Therefore don’t forget to mix things up a little when backlink building. The odd nofollow “pointless” backlink is actually a good thing.

http://www.techwyse.com/blog/search-eng ... a-penalty/

Great stuff Daisy - the point about spammy sites with unmoderated comments can extend to sites that also generally link out to "bad neighborhoods". Industries like debt consolidation, credit card offers, casinos/gambling, pharmacies and pornography for instance are often bad neighbourhoods. If links to these sorts of sites are being posted somewhere, you don't want links to any of our websites appearing near them.

Blog networks generally fall under the penalization that happened for link schemes. I doubt a site would get penalized for being part of a larger and more useful blog network that is useful for users, but joining a whole bunch to build backlinks is easily detectable by Google.

The other thing to consider in the balance of types of links is run-of-site links. RoS links are not nearly as valuable as they once were, but can still be good. However, a lot of RoS links in a site's backlink profile will look unusual and likely be devalued or even cause penalization.

General considerations of this sort are why I was mentioning to Arya and Elan that I'm happy for much more time to be spent on competitor backlink research. Spending a decent amount of time getting to know what kinds of backlink profiles competitors have will give a very good indication as to what is working for them and what a normal backlink profile looks like for a website in that industry. Different industries will have rather different opportunities they can take advantage of. An interior design/furniture related site might have a very blog-heavy backlink profile because there are so many design blogs out there. On the other hand, a maker of specialized industrial equipment (like Gemsys) might have a larger number of links coming from corporate websites and educational institutions.