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Part
of achieving top search engine positions is
through links from other Web pages. These links
can come from people who like your site (natural
links), reciprocal linking, directory submissions
and a few other ways.
The goal of trading links is to get quality links
for quality links. True quality links will carry
benefits far beyond that of attaining a coveted
position in the search engine results. The links
will bring traffïc from the Web page linking to
your Web page. Therefore, you want to ensure you
trade or barter links from quality partners.
Sometimes it's hard to determine who is a quality
linking partner, even for the expert. So, how can
you tell if your link is on a Web page where its
value will not be very good?
The short list below highlights ways of
diminishing or nullifying the value of a link to
your site from another Web page.
Meta Tag Masking - this old
trick simply used CGI codes to hide the Meta tags
from browsers while allowing search engines to
actually see the Meta tags.
Robots Meta Instructions - using
noindex and nofollow attributes let's the novice
link partner see the visible page with their link
while telling the search engines to ignore the
page and the links found on the page. Nofollow
can be used while allowing the page to be indexed
which gives the impression that the search
engines will eventually count the link.
Rel=nofollow Attributes - this
is not a real attribute based upon HTML
standards, but rather it is an attribute approved
by the search engines to help identify which
links should not be followed. This attribute is
often used with blogs to prevent comment and link
sp@m. The link will appear on the Web page and in
the search engine's cache, but nevër be counted.
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Dynamic Listing - dynamic
listing is a result of having links appear
randomly across a series of pages. Each time the
link is found on a new page, the search engines
count consider the freshness of the link. It is
extremely possible that the link won't be on the
same page upon the next search engine visitation.
So, the link from a partner displaying rotating,
dynamic link listings rarely helps.
Floating List - this can be
easily missed when checking link partners.
Essentially, your link could be number one today,
but as new link partners are added your link is
moved down the list. This is harmful because the
values of the links near the bottom of the list
are considered to be of lesser value than the
links at the top. With the floating list, it is
possible to have your link moved to a new page
whose PR value is significantly less or
non-existent and the new page may not be visited
and indexed for months.
Old Cache - the caching date
provided by Google indicates the last time the
page was cached. Pages with lower PR values tend
to be visited and cached less often than pages
that have medium to high PR values. If the cache
is more than six months old, it can be surmised
that Google has little or no desire to revisit
the page.
Denver Pages - while Denver, CO
is a nice place to visit, Denver Pages are not a
place you want to find your link in a trade.
Denver Pages typically have a large amount of
links grouped into categories on the same page.
Some people call this the mile high list. These
types of pages do not have any true value in the
search engines and are not topically matched to
your site.
Muddy Water Pages - these are
dangerous and easy to spot. Your link will be
piled in with non-topically matched links with no
sense of order. It's like someone took all the
links and threw them in the air to see where they
land. These are worse than the Denver Pages.
Cloaking - cloaking is the
process of providing a page to people while
providing a different page to search engines. You
could be seeing your link on the Web page, but
the search engines could possibly nevër see the
link because they are provided with a different
copy. Checking Google's cache is the only way to
catch this ploy.
Dancing Robots - this can be
easily performed with server-side scripting like
PHP and is rarely easy to catch. In this
situation people that attempt to view the
robots.txt file receive a copy of the robots.txt
file that does not include exclusion instructions
for the search engines. However, when the search
engines request the robots.txt file they receive
the exclusion instructions. With this situation
the links pages will nevër be linked and you'll
nevër know why without expert assistance.
Meta Tags and Robots.txt Confusion -
which instructions have the most weïght? Don't
know the answer? Shame. Search engines do. If
they conflict, the page Meta tags are typically
considered the rule to follow.
Link the Head - while these
links do not count in the search engines and do
not show up on the Web page, they do get counted
by scripts or programs designed to verify the
links exist. These programs only look for the URL
within the source codes for the Web page.
Empty Anchors - this is a nästy
trick, but can be an honest mistake. The links
exist and are counted by the search engines, but
unfortunately are neither visible nor clickable
on the Web page. So, there are no traffïc values
from the link.
The goal of trading links is to trade them for
equal value. Understanding the ways people will
attempt to prevent passing a quality value from
their Web page to your Web page can help you
avoid these useless links. If your link partner
pulls under-handed tricks the links they trade
you are useless.
While you may nevër be an expert in knowing all
the latest tricks, traps and tests, you can nöw
become an expert in knowing the thirteen
mentioned above. Ensuring your link partners are
not following or using these tactics can help
improve the quality of links you gain from other
Web pages. By having quality links pointing to
your Web page you will gain additional traffïc
through organic search engine results and
visitors driven directly from your linking
partners.
About The Author
Lee Roberts, The Web Doctor®, is
President/Founder of Rose Rock Design, Inc. a
website design company and Founder of the Apple
Pie Shopping Cart, an ecommerce shopping cart.
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