What is the safest way to develop links without getting penalized? I submitted one of my old site to hundreds of directories and got penalized so i dont want ot make the same mistake.
The trick is to make your link building look as natural as possible to the search engines. So that means build links gradually and with multiple link anchor texts. Don't get too many links at once and don't get too many links from any one source. Also try to link to both your homepage and your internal pages. You may be best off avoiding certain directories and other free-for-all links. Ensure you gets links from quality sites too. If your links are all from junk sites, it reflects poorly on your own site.
vansterdam offers good advice, another often overlooked method is... ummm... writing good content that will naturally encourage people to link to it. I dunno why I said that... maybe it's that so many people are begging for links and their English blogger blog looks like it was written by someone who took English as a 5th language.
I doubt very much that you got penalized... If that were the case, then people would be submitting their competitors website URL's to tons of directories in an effort to sabotage their rankings in the Serp's
I didn't get officially penalized but before I started directory submissions I had PR4. Then, the most recent update I went down to PR2. That was the same update Google removed their recommendation of directory submissions so thats why I thought they penalized me. Thanks for the advice guys, really helpful. I think with this site, I won't submit to any directories. And thats a good suggestion of linking to internal pages. Is there a way to buy a paid link without Google knowing its paid? Like they think the webmaster just added your sites link there because its very resourceful? Thanks.
Directory are a good ways to get links. They are not that worthy but still they are links. As of your paid links thing. You can buy it from any Webmaster. Just remember that you don't openly do the deal. I mean, do it behind the scenes so that Google don't get you.. in other words, don't post on your site that you want to buy links or don't buy links from the sites which openly sell links,, cause it is against google and they are going to penalize them sooner or later.