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 |
|
"...participating in services where you agree
to add a list of |
|
".. we pay attention to products that automate
link management, |
(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.
