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| Top Dirty Linking Tricks By Lee Roberts (c) 2006, Rose Rock Design, Inc. |
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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. |
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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.
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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?
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The short list below
highlights ways of diminishing or nullifying the value of a link to your
site from another Web page.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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