CNVI - 11:01 pm on Mar 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

Hello,

My name is Joel Lesser and I am the owner and CEO of Creative NetVentures, Inc, parent company of LinksManager.com.

I was notified that LinksManager and our LinkChecker bot was being discussed here in this forum so wanted to take a moment and reply to the concerns addressed here.

LinksManager.com is a patent pending application service that manages links pages for hundreds of websites that are powered by LinksManager. We are not a link farm or an automated service that pushes links to our customer's accounts. The majority of an account's links are submitted by webmasters requesting inclusion on a website's links pages powered by LinksManager.

LinksManager powers links pages for all sorts of sites such as http://www.1stforparties.com and http://www.localmusicdirectory.com and
large portals such as http://gamblinglinks.com.

When we designed LinksManager back in the late 90's, we incorporated a LinkChecker bot into the system so that when a link is added to a LinksManager powered website, the administrator of that account is notified when the link is being reciprocated. The only way to check for reciprocation is to run a link checker bot through the site looking for reciprocation.

The link checkers only browse text and does not download high bandwidth files such as graphics or rich media. The checkers are intentionally programmed not to put excessive load onto any one site. For more information about our bot: http://linksmanager.com/linkchecker.html.

It is true that the LinksManager link checker currently ignores robots.txt. We have struggled with this in the past.. if the checker ignores robots.txt, then reciprocation can be verified. If the link checker skips sites that have robots.txt, it's impossible for the LinksManager LinkChecker bot to do it's job effectively.

We are happy to add your domain to our ignore file upon request.

As robots.txt becomes more popular with webmasters, we are reanalyzing how reciprocation can be reported without having to spider the reciprocating site without the use of the LinkChecker bot. This takes time and an alternative solution will hopefully be forthcoming in the not too distant future. Comments such as yours on this forum help us realize how important this is to webmasters and I appreciate you discussing it here so we can be aware of your concerns.

Kindest Regards,
Joel Lesser