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Ok I am trying to decide if Links Manager is a valuable asset or a fun toy that makes me feel warm and fuzzy about hundreds of other wise useless “link exchanges” In my mind there is no clear cut answer. There are pros and cons and I am wrestling with this as I pay for Links manager at more then 20 sites each month currently (way more actually) and I cant decide if I am doing anything of substance to improve my sites or search rankings.
I am including a poll for those that want to weigh in without posting, but if you have a minute I would appreciate your thoughts on this subject. I think the feedback will prove valuable for other webmasters too.
Heres my list of pros and cons:
Pro
* Saves a great deal of time over standard html linking and page updates. Allows me to process hundreds of links each week. And I do receive this many requests across my network
* Has reciprocal link checker. This is the biggest asset in my opinion though not without problems. Not always reliable on links that may exist.
* You are listed in Link Partners and receive a steady stream of new link partners each week. You can actually get by without going out and looking for link partners if you wish.
* Automated mailing of link acceptance/declines
* Seemless integration with your site design
* Easy administrationCon
* Makes you lazy so you tend to not go out and seek quality link exchanges
* 99% of the links you’ll receive will be from PR0 or PR1 pages and wont be credited by Google so while you feel like you are making progress your page rank isnt really helped much at all.
* You end up with hundreds of outbound links to PR0 or PR1 pages so you may actually HURT your home page Page Rank if you aren’t careful
* Since you rely on built in recip checker it’s very easy to not notice sneaky redirects or dead pages galore. Many people set up a good link page when they make initial requests then several weeks later put it in a frame, install a cloaking script or bury it so they just receive inbound link credits. My good friend the Captain discovered alot of this going on with his sites and as I have started looking I see some of the same shenanigans going on.
* If you have multiple sites the costs can mount quickly. Imagine 50 or more sites being billed $21.95 a month and you can see why it starts to become an issue.Please take a minute to vote or comment
Well the cons you have listed far outweigh the pros in my opinion.
Back in the day when links were just a webmasterly thing to do this would have been a great tool. Today however with the advent of site ranking algorithms which in part consider linking practices, I don’t think it’s very beneficial tool
As you pointed out 99% (and that may be high) of the sites that you will exchange with will have a very low PR. Furthermore, good percentage of these sites wont even have the script set up correctly, so page 8 where you link is located wont even get crawled.
Nothing personal to anyone that uses it, but I have always stated this is a lazy mans tool and that taking the time to build your link partners manually will always be more beneficial to both individuals participating in a link exchange.
This may be getting off topic, but is related to the manual processes …
Of late I am getting more stringent when accepting link partners. I am putting more emphasis on the quality of my partners sites than I ever was. I have seen evidence that Google is beginning to place more weight on the quality not quantity of links both inbound and outbound.
Additionally, I am also interested in mutually beneficial link exchanges i.e. if I put a partner on a PR6 link page, I don’t want to be on their PR 2 link page.
So my opinion is much the same as Nikes old slogan JUST DO IT – manually that is!
Personally I love the reciprocal checker. It saves me a lot of time checking other peoples sites.
Also it’s a nice tool for the ‘average’ (read: useless) link requests.
You can link fast and easy without being impolite.It doesn’t take the hard work away of finding quality link partners and requesting good links.
Conclusion: yes I’m happy with it since it saves me loads of time. the valuable linking however is still done by hand and done on other pages than the linksmanager directory.
P.S. any juicy PR7, PR6 or PR5 linkers around? .. just pm me
The only thing I dislike about LM is the reciprocal checker is not real accurate. I can’t tell you how many show that the site is not linking to me and when I go to their site to double check it, most of the times it’s there. I also receive emails daily from other LM users that they can’t find their link on my site, when it is.
Other than that I absolutely love it.What about the software program ARELIS ? Anybody have experiences with that?
Hi,
I personally also use LM, and I love it. But, there are certain things I do:
I actually create my own link index site, which means that I don’t use the one given by LM. This is so that I can link to multiple pages within a category from the index page. That way, all the linkspages should receive the same PR, and it doesn’t matter for my partners if they are listed on pg. 1 or 9, they still get the same link.
In addition, I also go out and search for partners myself.
I do agree that it’s a lazy man tool, but it saves me a lot of time.
Also, if you have several sites on which you use LM (5 or more), you should email their support for discount pricing. I currently have 11 accounts with them, and I think that I pay about $16 per account, which is still a lot, but better than $20 per month per account.
Hope this helps,Thomas
the cost when used on multiple sites drive my bottom line down, I moved to a free tool that does it
/Janet
