How Link Exchange Partners Cheat You
It is not just you, these things happen to everyone. Worrying only leads to more problems.
You need to relax, it is a great method to get ideas, inspirations and
solutions. The other thing is that making link exchanges is not an easy
task, but time consuming if you do not invest some money in some
software.
The other important thing is to take things more easy. What that means
is you should not complain or waste a lot of time discussing why this
or why that. Time is precious. These are common things that every
webmasters faces. Once you know this you should feel a bit better.
The nofollow tag.
Some webmasters use the nofollow tag either on your link, or on their
links page. You need to make sure that spiders can reach the page your
link is on. Sometimes webmasters put the nofollow tag on the link
pointing to their linkspage, which is located on the homepage. There
are plugins that highlight links that are using nofollow tags or find
out some other tools if you do not wish to check this manually.
The robots file.
Robots files are used sometimes instead of the nofollow tags to block
spiders from indexing the linkspage. You need to check this file, which
is called robots.txt and located in the root of the website. Make sure
spiders are allowed to visit the linkspage.
The meta tag.
You need to check the meta tags of the homepage and also the meta tags
of the page your link is on. In both tags, you need to make sure they
are not blocking the spiders in some way or another. The attributes
that you need to look for are all, index, follow. That means spiders
should follow all links and index them all.
They remove your link.
If your link partner removes your link from their website, rest assured
not all of your partners will notify you. As long as they are not using
some script that does it automatically you will have to check this out
for yourself. There are scripts and software to do this easily. So keep
record somewhere always of the location your partner placed your link
so you check every one or two months.
This happens for several reasons. Sometimes webmasters do it because
they cannot find a link back and most common reason is because you
moved their link. So like my first suggestion never waste time
complaining and moaning about this. Simple email them and let them know
you are going to remove their link because you cannot find yours. Give
them an option to re submit their link.
For example, tell them you can reply to this email if you are still
interested in a link exchange. Then if after a couple of days they do
not reply, send them another email and then after another couple of
days remove their link if they do not reply.
They are not linking to the linkspage from anywhere.
That is another problem. Usually if they are not linking to their
linkspage from their homepage you can easily tell. The linkspage will
have no menus, just a blank page with links. Most webmasters who do
this simple do not know they have to link to their linkspage from their
homepage. They are new to seo.
So check if they are linking to it from the homepage only if the
linkspage has absolutely nothing but links. To make sure then google
the page and see if it is in the index, if it is then obviously it is
linked from somewhere.
Keep those in mind when you are doing link exchanges, find some plugins
or software to help you do things faster. But always treat your link
partners they way you want them to treat you. Remember they are helping
you improve search engine rankings.
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