Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz.org often releases some great videos, articles and insight into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Today we bring your attention to this video on “Off-Site Over-Optimization”.

In this video, Rand talks primarily about links that point to your website – that is – someone who has placed a link on their site pointing to yours, who hopefully has done so because they value your site highly and the content between your sites is relevant and rewarding to the visitors.

Links play a big role in increasing your search engine ranking as links are valued by search engines as ‘votes’. For example if I place a link from my website to Rand’s website then that would be looked at by a search engine as me placing a vote for Rand’s website because I like it so much.

In this video on Off-Site Over-Optimization, Rand speaks of the dangers of aquiring links that would appear un-natural in nature. For example if you engaged in purchasing a package to get you 5000 links for $50 (or something like that), this would most definitely cause a huge spike in links to your site (from the usual pattern), thereby triggering a spam alert to search engines, who will further investigate your website, and most likely penalize it as a result.

Check out the video below for further information:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Offsite “Over-Optimization” from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.