Links Exchange – Don’t Give a Link for Free
Links exchange. Most webmasters start promoting their websites by exchanging plain text links with other websites. It’s a great way to get more traffic because text link serves as a “vote” for major search engines. The more links you have pointing to website – the higher popularity you get in search engines, website appears at the top of search results and more traffic comes.
Simple, right? You just need to find as much partners as possible and start counting incoming links. But be very careful when searching for new partners to exchange links. Why? Because i saw lots of webmasters which give you “not real” link. If you ask yourself: “What does mean not real link?”, there is an explanation… Search engines (Google for example) count just plain text links. If spider finds this link – Software News – it’s ok, because this link is direct. But i’m sure you saw some links, which just point user to another website and looks like http://www.domain.com/link.php?id=xxx for example. When visitor clicks on this link, internal script starts working and assigned website is opened. Everything looks just fine, but you should know, that search engines don’t count these links and you don’t get any credits.
Do you need a better example? Here it is… Let’s say you give me 10 dollars and when i need to give them back, i do this: take a pencil, paper and write – 10 Dollars. The results: you have 10 dollars, but actually you have nothing at the same time. Yes, just big 0. The same thing is here. Webmaster asks you to place a simple text link and he adds hardcoded link to your website. The fact is, that webmaster gets some nice credits for free. Oh, i forgot to say… You get something too – nice 0.
If someone offers you to exchange text links, don’t be fooled. Ask for a simple text link or just decline this offer and search for a better partner.
March 31st, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Interesting way of thinking, Mindaugas…
I saw lots of websites which contain links directories (or so called links modules) and use these “bad” links. So what does it mean? All of them are “cheaters”???
Don’t agree with you!
April 1st, 2005 at 6:37 am
However the way you have this site setup, if I were to say, make some kind of comment and put my website in, google would pick it right up. This is, like you said, because you dont have your site setup to use php?id=xxx. However WordPress automatically put in the rel=nofollow into my link witch makes it so that I still am not getting anything. But I’m pretty sure that Google is that only search engine that uses this method so I would still be getting credit in say yahoo or msn or anything else.
I wonder if there is a way to take out the rel=nofollow out of commenter’s links, maybe as a way to draw more traffic. If there isn’t I’m sure someone has a plugin that will do this.
And the cheaters method is to put your link inside of the comment because, I’m pretty sure WordPress doesn’t add the rel=nofollow to links inside of the actual comment.
April 1st, 2005 at 6:52 am
Hello Wyatt,
You are right. After your message i was interested how to remove “nofollow” tag for links (because WordPress adds these tags automatically) and i’ve found a way to solve it.
All you need is to do this:
Open file \wp-includes\comment-functions.php
Look at line 173.
Remove
rel='external nofollow'part and save your file.Upload a file to server. Didn’t test it myself, but i think it should work fine.
April 21st, 2005 at 9:24 pm
what you meant is a simple redirect script (usually javascript and some php headers) where you click the link on one of these dir/shocase sites and instead of linking directly to you, they load a page and redirect it to your URI, which means you don’t get any pagerank plusses.
good of you to point that out, i think this blog is really helpful :)
April 23rd, 2005 at 1:36 am
Thank you for comments, jorge, i’ll do my best to provide more useful information.
You are running a nice blog also ;)