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Link Exchange Scams
by Azal Azani
I have written in an article about
the importance to be linked by other web site in order to increase
your link popularity. It is related to PageRank. The more back link
you get, the higher your PageRank will be, and the higher ranking
you will get in the search engine when somebody searches your
keywords. You may easily found many of webmasters really eager to
exchange links with each other especially when the other page's
PageRank is higher then them. Just type "link exchange" in Google
you will found thousands of them. But you must be very careful in
choosing web site to exchange link. Some of them just make your
PageRank going down into the drain by wasting your PageRank.
Firstly, what is PageRank? PageRank is a numeric value that
represents how important a page is on the web. When one page links
to another page, actually it is telling the search engine the
importance of other page. When more links a page got from another
page, it shows how important the page must be.
While surfing around looking for web sites to exchange link I found
some of webmasters doing bad thing to their link partner. One
example is to add the directory where those links are located in
disallow line in "robots.txt".
What exactly the webmaster want to do? Actually, the webmaster
restrict any search engine's robot from crawling into the directory,
in this case 'linkbuilder' directory. If you have exchange link with
this web site, the spider will not see your link on the page, so it
contribute nothing to you PageRank. Obviously, your web page has a
link to this web site (because you exchange link with him) and the
spider see it. Your web page give a point to the web site, but the
website give nothing to yours. As a result the PR of the web site
will increase, but your web site's PageRank will go down.
Another way of link exchange's scam is to make your link hidden from
search engines' spiders. The link can be hidden by putting it inside
javascript, redirect it to a php or asp process page, instead of
plain 'a href' HTML code. Using CSS (cascading style sheets) also
can trick your eye, which make link appear to be correct, but in
fact it is redirected to another way around before it go to your web
site.
Meta Tag also can be use by selfish web masters to hide link.
Actually it is not hide link, but instruct the search engines'
spiders to ignore any link on the page. So the spiders will not
consider the link as a point of importance of other page. The meta
tag use for this action is "nofollow".
As a way of precaution to increase your link popularity (and
PageRank) by link exchange is you have to make sure:
1. The directory which the link is located is not restricted to any
spider (robot). On the web browser's address bar type http://www.websitetocheck.com/robots.txt.
Check the restricted directory.
2. Always check the source code, make sure the link is directly
pointing to your web site by 'a href='http://www.yourwebsite.com'
3. Check those links in weekly or monthly basis, if the link which
is pointing to your web site is missing, delete their link on your
web site.
4. Check the meta tag of the page and try to find ' meta
name="robots" content="nofollow" '
About the Author
Azal
Azani is the developer of http://www.pc24hours.net and http://www.ccautosoft.com
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