Top Dirty Linking Tricks
By Lee Roberts,
The Web Doctor®,
The President/Founder of Rose Rock Design, Inc.
lee_roberts at roserockdesign.com
http://www.roserockdesign.com/
http://www.applepiecart.com/
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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
traffic 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 spam.
The link will appear on the Web page and in the
search engine's cache, but never be counted.
- 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 not 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 thrown 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 never 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 never be linked and you'll never know why
without expert assistance.
- Meta Tags and Robots.txt Confusion - which instructions have the most weight? 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 nasty 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 traffic 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 never be an expert in knowing all the latest
tricks, traps and tests, you can now 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 will you gain additional
traffic through organic search engine results and
visitors driven directly from your linking partners.
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.
2006 © Lee Roberts. All Rights Reserved.
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