As a vital step to internet marketing, link building is often overlooked. By increasing your external links, you are building popularity with links back to your site. This has several ways that it can affect you, and if done incorrectly, are not all good.
When link building for your site, you should always be cautious where you submit your request for links. Link farms can be especially harmful to your link popularity building efforts if you are not careful. Link farms have a bad reputation with search engines, and when your link appears in these, it too will carry that reputation among the engines. Some directories are the same way. Always be 100% positive that where are requesting for a link is a reputable web site that will not pass "bad juice" to yours.
A common mistake that typically results in lots of wasted time is getting back links, and then getting "pink linked" by the site owner. Put very simply, a pink link is the term used when a no-follow tag has been applied. This is not harmful in anyway to your site, but it in turn defeats the entire purpose of link building, as the search engine will not follow the link nor give you a credit for having back links.
This is by no means all there is to know about link building and link popularity. All in all, be extremely careful when submitting your web site for links, as it could defeat the entire purpose of your internet marketing.