The Truth About Link Exchanges
We have received information from a pretty trusted source that Link
Exchanges are something that some of the search engines frown on and are penalizing for using them.
Here is what the search engines are formally stating:
"...participation in certain services to artificially inflate
link popularity.."
"...participating in services where you agree to add a list of
links page on your site. Other participants in the link exchange
service agree to do the same, thereby improving everyone's link
popularity..."
".. we pay attention to products that automate link management,
check site ranking, cloak, generate automatic doorways, etc. And
people who abuse those tools may run afoul of scoring in the just
same way as people who do unethical things by hand.. "
(The first 2 quotes are from Market Position Monthly, Feb. 2001)
What's springing up around the Internet are these Free-for-All type link exchanges. You put your link in a
page that everyone is supposed to copy and update once a month, to a page on your website. So you have 400
links on a page, all jumbled up, no ordered organization, total link chaos and this is attached to your
website with your domain name embedded into the url address for all to see. This is supposed to look like
everyone included has links pointing to and from them and then the search engines are going to just love
this, thus sending the webmaster the traffic they so desperately need to survive.
Now along comes the search engine robots, which are the most sophisticated machines ever known to man,
infused with millions of dollars of development money, pretty much all-knowing of every keyword on the
Internet and the pages to which they belong, running on banks of super computers, sitting at the apex of giga
giga giga bytes of storage. Besides just link popularity, these machines do correlational calculations,
linking Themes or subjects together. It knows the keywords belonging to each website and has the ability to
do statistical correlation which is common in most languages used to create these programs. A quick query to
it's database and it comes up with a score of how closely you are in Theme-tightness to the sites you are
linking to and perhaps even how tightly-themed those sites you are linked to, are to the ones linked to on
their websites. The more tightly-themed you score means you are only including websites in your link pages
that match or have something to do with the Themes of your website.
What we have here in the case of free-for-all link pages is total link chaos. No organization to it at all.
Of course these sites using these methods will be punished. I'm sure that since Zeus already has the program
code to recognize these websites, these search engine robot programmers, who know what they are doing :-),
have programmed their search engine robots with something similar also.
When Zeus finds the text patterns matching these known link cancers or free-for-all link pages, he
immediately backs out of the site, marking it visited and NOT a ThemeSite no matter what the site has to
offer, then goes on to the next site. Thus completely ignoring it. It doesn't exist.
I feel very strongly against webmasters creating these types of link pages, ruining the very organizational
fabric of the Internet, in their ignorance in believing numbers win out over quality or to the appeal of the
easy way out. Those sites with these known text pattern matches will never be included in a Zeus-generated
Link Directory.
Now think how these same smart search engine robots think when they stumble across a Zeus-generated Link
Directory. The thousands of links listed in Zeus directories are websites that match each other in Themes
without the threads of the cancerous growth of link disorder infringing into it. The difference is like night
and day, organization over disarray.
Thousands of links, all nicely organized on hundreds of keyword-tuned pages. Resonant Keyword patterns
throughout each page, using the embedded keywords you selected as your Themes. These are used in the meta
tags, titles, text, and most importantly, the page's url address. Add to each page the hundreds of listings
which include those same keywords again and again in each ThemeSite's url address, title, description and
comment and perhaps banner image url address. These are very good pages to find for a search engine robot.
Order against chaos.
No Zeus user has reported any decrease of traffic from the search engines. Zeus-generated link directory
pages are not artificially inflating link popularity. We are increasing link popularity properly. Those of us
who use Zeus, without abuse, should have no problems whatsoever, as we bring order to chaos.
The problem, as I see it, is that uninformed webmasters will start shying away from links of any kind. Can
you imagine the Internet without links? All because of misinformation. It would be the end of the Internet as
we know it today. If we don't inform the public on how to properly obtain and use Reciprocal Links and the
dangers of using these Links-for-All pages, every webmaster on the net will pay for it. Please email your
webmaster friends, post this to the marketing boards, add it to your website. Let's take care of this before
panic sets in.
Content has been reprinted with permission of the author.
First appeared in
http://www.cyber-robotics.com
© 1999-2000 David Notestine, all rights remain with author.
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