Get exclusive CAP network offers from top brands

View CAP Offers

Links Manager Warning!!!!

Professor asked 3 years ago
Due to the number of portals penalized by Google during their recent update I decided to go back through one of my Links Manager accounts and verify each link for the following:

* PR of Index Page I was linking to.
* PR of Back link as identified by Links Managers reciprocal checker

Please note that I was already checking all links at each update to ensure they were reciprocal so I maintain fairly strict monitoring (or thought I did) prior to yesterdays test.

When I began manually checking these yesterday according to links manager I had 335 links in place with 100% reciprocation.

By the time I was done I had less then 160 links remaining. 😮

I expected to delete some sites that had been penalized and I did find about 15 which were now PR0s or PR1. The rest that had to be eliminated are what concerns me most. Many were removed due to cheating and link tricks by the site owner and the level of this was very disturbing. I did not blame Links Manager for bad human behavior as I suppose assholes will always find a way to try to cheat partners. But I was very surprised to find at least 30 links that were showing reciprocation by the Links Manager control panel were down! The pages no longer existed either at the portal owners site OR at LINKS MANAGER themselves. This raises serious concerns about the validity of the reciprocal links checker.

I am going to post what some of the cheaters were doing so you know what to look for when verifiying your links (if you choose to do so). I hope that this does not inspire others to mimic these techiniques but I figured its worth chancing it to expose what these frigging parasites are doing.

See next post

16 Answers
DivaG answered 3 years ago
I have caught dishonest Link Exchangers creating a robots.txt that deny specific bots from even indexing the pages your links are on. So while your link checker validates the link exists it actually never gets spidered by the bots that count.

I have been using http://www.linkmetro.com which is a link exchange community that has many side benefits and a rating system. You can limit what category of requests you will accept. So far I don’t have any complaints and I have been able to garner some decent trafic from the exchanges I have brokered there.

Quality links always are worth the time and trouble, it is not all about how many but more about the quality of the site linking to you and don’t get too hung up on Google PR. I have seen plenty of top ranking sites with a 0 PR.
Sources like http://www.marketleap.com are a better barometer for checking into the link popularity of a site.

Ginette

chris@poker.com answered 3 years ago
its a good concept, having a links manager, in theory if used properly saves time, but the only method i stand by is manually checking your links periodically.

TheGooner answered 3 years ago
Well … I’m obviously a Dinosaur.
hno:

I only link to sites that I like.
I don’t care about your PR.
I’d prefer you had your own domain name.
Sites I personally use or refer to.

Reciprocal links are NOT required (although always nice).

Is that strange?
Or have we all gone recip link nuts?

Bring back the old web I say … where webmasters cared …
(err … I’ll just get my coat and be off then shall I ? ) …

:la-de-da:

answered 3 years ago
TheGooner wrote:
Well … I’m obviously a Dinosaur.
hno:

I only link to sites that I like.
I don’t care about your PR.
I’d prefer you had your own domain name.
Sites I personally use or refer to.

Reciprocal links are NOT required (although always nice).

Is that strange?
Or have we all gone recip link nuts?

Nah i largely agree. You dont get anything without working at it IMO. This whole linking-to-aid-SERPS thing is crap. Sure it was justified a few years back when people linked naturally on a largely non-revenue generating web, but now its too open to manipulation.

I think links are a short-term solution personally. When SE’s get their act together and realise they have created a monster with all this 3rd party PPC and Link Relevance rubbish, it’ll be a better place.

voodooman answered 3 years ago
Prof,

I recently posted in the Link Exchange Forum that one of our very own CAP members had exchanged front page recip links with my poker site then immediately removed my link. If I had not decided to manually double check this persons sites, I would never have noticed.

If you go to the Link Exchange Forum you will notice that there has been NO RESPONSE to my warning (in which I posted his sites URLS) so that nobody else exchanges links with hese sites.

I thought I could trust CAP members above all and this experience/individual has soured me on the whole link exchange thing even with fello members here–UGH!

Google/Yahoo need to eliminate their dependence on recip links fast and jusge sites on freshness and content.

john867 answered 3 years ago
I have done link exchanges in the past and can definately say that doing link exchanges are much more trouble than what they are worth.

I prefer to get quality one way links. Getting these are easy enough and infact are just as easy, if not even easier than actually getting link exchanges.