paynt - 2:59 pm on Apr 8, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi ArcticMan and another welcome to Webmasterworld.

That’s cool that a linking partner sent you here. Once you’ve moved beyond your linking question into the rest of forum, plan to set a month aside for reading.

Your question about site descriptions, I suppose it’s more of what your partners want or are willing to exchange but I personally have no problem with just a title link, as long as I get the anchor text I want. Am I understanding you correctly, that you re planning on adding descriptive text content of your own, to describe the category and the sites that follow? The point is to get those terms (keywords) into the content of the page to help at least with those searching for a potential linking partner.

If you do opt for including descriptions inform folks that you retain the right to change them to fit your policy. Give them clues on what you would like to see. ODP is a great example for help in determining what is an acceptable title/description. People are clueless about how descriptions with, “the best site on the web for” comments simply waste their opportunity to effectively promote their site. Again, I miss the emphasis on meta tags, very helpful for learning to optimize for a good title/description.

Text helps a link page in many different ways, it just depends on what your ultimate goal for the page is. Are you using your text to draw in potential new partners? Are you using the text the emphasis your themes? Perhaps to boost the page so it acts as a entry to your site? Is the text there to please your partners? Those are a few items I would consider.

As far as links being counted, we only see them show up in Google as linked if the PR is 4, although lower PR pages are counted they just don’t show up in the backlinks. That’s ok, it’s not all about PR. You can also go to FAST and run a link check to see the lower PR links that are connected but not showing up in Google.

You’ll want to use the site search to find out specific conversations where backlinks have been discussed in the Google forum. Thanks for jumping in ArcticMan and that we’ve helped you. Please post again.