hugo_guzman - 4:59 pm on Jul 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

This is a great topic for discussion.

Personally, I would look for sites that are well established in the "real world". For example, if you have a sports related site, it may be a good idea to link to a espn.com page. I operate a shipping consulting site, so I chose to link to FEDEX and UPS.

If there are some "real world" authority sites like these in your specific industry, I would advise linking to them, because you can more or less sure that you will not suffer any penalties by linking to them. The really large multinational corporate sites do not need to use questionable seo tactics and they are pretty much entrenched in the top spots of Google's search engine results. If there aren't any of these mega sites in your industry, you you'll have to really do your homework!