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Ok:
So I don’t really understand why sites exchange links with each other. What practical benefits do you get from this? How? and Why?
Thanks, guys. I appreciate the help.
Depends upon how you look at it…
PR Boost: Google Page Rank is spread via ‘votes’. A ‘vote’ is a direct link to your site from another site. The higher the PR of the site linking to you, the higher the PR that passes to your site. The higher your PR (to Google), the more Google considers your site an authority site.
Traffic: If your link is on other sites (especially gambling related) you will get some (limited), but very targetted traffic.
Spidering: An easy way to let the search engines know that your site is out there (and the best way, IMO) is to have a link on another site which gets spidered a lot (usually the higher the PR, the more often they are spidered).
Giving Options: To give your visitors options. They might hit the ‘back’ button, but if they see another site of similar content… it is a good way to make your site of use to them.
Hope this helps.
Now that you have learned what a link exchange is from kwblue’s excellent summary, let’s talk about link etiquette and what to watch out for.
If your site is new but shows potential you shouldnt have trouble finding quality link partners – though some will turn you down because to cultivate a link section that will pass some PR. You cant have 200 low quality partners on one page or you will pass very little.
1. Be Fare
If you have a high quality site with a decent PR, don’t offer a link exchange to a ridiculous crap site thats only obvious purpose to cultivate three ways. This often happens because people hire third party consultants to seek one way links.2. Things to watch for
– Trade and remove : people love to make a trade then remove your link after a few months so they can use that space to make more trades. Keep track of all your trades and check them periodically.
– nofollow :
You need to check three things
i. look for (rel=”nofollow”) in the link of your page.
ii. look for in header (or anywhere ont he page for that matter.
iii. look for http://www.thesite.com/robots.txt and see if it has any directives not to follow links in the directory or file that you are listed in. If you want to be thorough you can look for a robots.txt file in each subdirectory along the heirarchy to the one that you are listed in.
note : if they really want to be evil they can create a no follow meta directive in iis.When buying links people often check to see if the pages come up in the backlinks of sites that are currently posted.
Thanks for the help, guys. Just a few more things that I’m confused about now.
bingoadvantage wrote:though some will turn you down because to cultivate a link section that will pass some PR. You cant have 200 low quality partners on one page or you will pass very little.Why would 200 low quality partners on one page be bad?
bingoadvantage wrote:1. Be Fare
If you have a high quality site with a decent PR, don’t offer a link exchange to a ridiculous crap site thats only obvious purpose to cultivate three ways. This often happens because people hire third party consultants to seek one way links.Whose obvious purpose is to what? And why wouldn’t I want to offer a link exchange to somebody if they’ll offer one back?
bingoadvantage wrote:2. Things to watch for
– Trade and remove : people love to make a trade then remove your link after a few months so they can use that space to make more trades. Keep track of all your trades and check them periodically.
– nofollow :Why would they need to remove my link in order to put up another link? Is there a limited number of links that my site can offer?
Thanks again for the help. I’m still learning here. :o)
ensign_lee wrote:Why would 200 low quality partners on one page be bad?The more links you have on a page, the less likely someone will want to exchange links. That page will look like a link farm to the search engines and have very little value to anyone.
ensign_lee wrote:Whose obvious purpose is to what? And why wouldn’t I want to offer a link exchange to somebody if they’ll offer one back?Many website owners hire ‘consultants’ to gather one-way links for them. They will give you a link on a page that is not even seen by the search engines (in many cases) or give you a link on a page that doesn’t relate to your industry (gambling). The result – they get a great themed link and you get crap, nothing, nada because the SE’s don’t see it or look at their page as a huge link farm.
ensign_lee wrote:Why would they need to remove my link in order to put up another link? Is there a limited number of links that my site can offer?They remove links because that is their purpose – to gain as many one way links as possible. They first pretend to link to you, then months later (when you stop checking) they remove the link and now have YOUR link pointing to their site and no reciprocation. Search Engines like one way links better than reciprocal links.
Hope that helps.
Oh, ok. So link farms = bad?
So where exactly should links go then? I always thought that most links would be on one page: something like “partners” or such.
If I can’t set up all the links on one page, what do I need to do then? Embed them on different pages?
Also, at what point does a search engine think that one of my pages is a link farm?
Thanks again for the help. :allears:
ensign_lee wrote:Oh, ok. So link farms = bad?So where exactly should links go then? I always thought that most links would be on one page: something like “partners” or such.
If I can’t set up all the links on one page, what do I need to do then? Embed them on different pages?
Also, at what point does a search engine think that one of my pages is a link farm?
Thanks again for the help. :allears:
Everyone will stated differently on the amount of links per page, but 20 is a good number and after that a new page should be created for additional links.
For example, I have 10 per page set up on my site at:
http://www.progressive-watch.com/interestingsites/index.php
You can see that if you go to Rogue Casinos (category) there are 2 pages because there are 14 links in the list (yes it says 18 links, but it is really just 14… not sure why)
Not sure where SE’s draw the line, but I am sure it is different for all SE’s anyway.
Ah, ok. Cool.
I think I understand then.
Thank you.Now, next topic: what are backlinks?
Just a point of clarity, as I understand it, a “link farm” is a single page that has a ton of links on it. As kwblue mentioned, everyone has a different idea on how many links per page is good vs. bad. I’ve seen everywhere from 50-100+ links on one page being bad. Many stick to the 10 per page method, I happen to go with 30 per page figuring to be staying well under the 50 threshold.
It seems to depend on the PR of the page. I think if the page has over PR5 anything under 100 is okay. PR 3 can handle 50 and 2, 20 and 1 or less better stick to 10.
Some of you guys have done this alot longer than me, does that match with your experience?
Never heard that breakdown before. Haven’t been as up with the SEO forums lately though, so maybe it is true. It would be hard to determine if there is any accuracy to it though.
