Ross - 8:51 pm on Jul 7, 2000 (gmt 0)

Poor old Zeus....he tends to get a very bad press, which is a shame because it's a very powerful tool that, when used responsibly can be extremely useful to a webmaster looking for reciprocal links. Used properly, it takes a great deal of time to look through all of the sites that Zeus has found, to ensure that you are emailing relevant sites.

I too have received emails from Zeus users looking for links. In one particular case it was from a site selling fine art reproductions (mine is a fishing site in the UK). When I emailed the authors of Zeus to ask if they could better control new users they blamed the users of the free version for not using the software in a responsible manner. My email had actually come from a registered, paid-up user !!.

But....I think that I've used it responsibly, and I've now got 168 extremely relevant reciprocal links that I just couldn't have got without Zeus. I had one irate e-mail from a person who didn't like Zeus and wouldn't consider linking to anyone who hadn't found his site by surfing. On the other hand I've had 20 or 30 very nice emails from sites all over the world, offering a reciprocal link and thanking me for explaining about the importance of link popularity, which I did in the initial email when asking for a link.

In conclusion you should compare Zeus to Cloaking....it's a very useful tool which can be used for good or evil, but don't blame the software, blame the user !!.