You know how it is, you have your new website running, you followed all the right Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips and structure your pages well with the right meta tags, content and layout. Then you consider your next step… building a solid foundation of inbound links.
As if by magic, a few days later and probably every other day from then on you receive that familiar email…
I think your site is really interesting and I wanted to link to it from my wonderful.com website?
I wanted to check with you first. I have over 100,000 monthly visitors and I would like to bring you a bit of increased traffic.
Is it also possible for you to link back to me from your site?
Be warned, it’s likely to be a link exchange scam for their SEO benefit…
In the good old days of the web, there was a real community spirit and people would happily provide links to each others sites. Nowadays with every site competing for those 10 positions on page 1 of Google things are unfortunately different and you may well be dealing with a link exchange scammer who will benefit from your link but tell the search engines to give you nothing back in return.
So, before you go ahead and agree to the link exchanger’s request, let me tell you about some of the things to look out for.
Go to the link exchanger’s site, find the page where they are suggesting they will add a link to your site and view the source code of that page.
1. Meta data telling search Robots to not index or follow
Look for the presence of a line within the <head> section of the code that looks like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />This tells search engines that this page should not be indexed and not to follow links on the page. So, if your page is listed on this page it will be ignored by the search engines.
2. The nofollow attribute
Take a look at the individual links on the page, if they include the nofollow attribute and look like this:
<a href="http://linktosomesite.com" rel="nofollow">Link to some site</a>
Then that link will be ignored by search engines.
3. Robots exclusion
Take a look at the site’s robots.txt file (www.theirdomainname.com/robots.txt) and look for a line that excludes the page containing external links. For example:
Disallow: /links.html
Again, if a line like this exists, the site manager is a link grabber and any of your links on their site won’t be given credit by Search Engines.
4. Indirect links to your site
If you’ve managed to avoid all the above pitfalls and you are ready to get your link added to the link exchanger’s site, hold on, we’re not done yet. Even if they are honest enough not to have written clever code to fool the search engines, you may find that links on their site aren’t all they appear to be.
For example, they may be using code behind what appears to be a genuine link to redirect to another page which then launches your website. This is all well and good for human visitors but a search engine will never run that code.
Say the link appears to go to www.mywebsite.com, take a look at the code and you may see something like this:
<a href="/linkdirectory.php?id=3245>www.mywebsite.com</a>
You’ll see that instead of giving search engines some nice clear keywords and a website to visit, they are directing the link to a piece of code that will then forward the visitor (but not necessarily a search engine to the site).
My thoughts on this
I think it’s a sad state of affairs when website links are traded like a valuable commodity. The web is about networking and community. The millions of pages competing for search popularity has diluted the value of the <link> tag to almost purely a search engine optimization tool.
Almost all the major blogging platforms have set all comment links to be “nofollow” because of this. Wikipedia has also made all external links “nofollow”.
HTML link categories
I can see a point where the HTML link specification will need to be expanded to support different categories of links: commercial, trusted, personal etc. with a way for both search engines and web users to see the difference when browsing pages.
The end of page rank?
The current “nofollow” method is reaching a point where web masters are becoming so protective of their site’s page rank that they are reluctant to give a genuine link away. Maybe that’s the solution - drop page rank and base a sites search rankings on other factors such as content quality, hits and perhaps even recommendations from real visitors?
Adam