Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Oh, don't be modest...
could you please offer some advice on which program/website to use to manage my links? The page is under construction and I really want to get it right from the get go.
I need something that will help me gather sites/emails to request quality on-topic links exchanges.
Thanks,
Jeff
Neil
[edited by: engine at 4:27 pm (utc) on Oct. 14, 2003]
[edit reason] No urls, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
Gossamer Threads is decent
Doug
Search engines won't penalize you for the tools you use to solicit or manage your links - they have no way of knowing, and have no reason to care. Using the software to publish those links, however, has been the problem. If you create your own HTML pages, the front-end tools you use should be no problem.
Why did some software-generated link directories get penalized? Probably because pages from these directories were ranking well in some searches, and the majority of the directories were very, very bad - little useful content, badly organized, and ugly to boot. It was easier to penalize them all than to try to manually sort out which were well-maintained and organized.
There's a lesson there - try to avoid using any content creation tool in a way that is identifiable. If that tool starts getting abused by others, or even if those pages start performing too well, you might get an unwelcome surprise.
There's a lesson there - try to avoid using any content creation tool in a way that is identifiable
Most definately - well said.
Oh, and welcome to WebmasterWorld cocoloco!
In the database, I've created various fields for things that I want to keep track of. I store all my outgoing links URLs, I store the incoming links of reciprocal links, I store various text notes about contact emails, I store last date checked, etc, etc.
Now here's the cool part. You can buy Plugins for Filemaker, that can fetch http and https webpages (as text) via GET and POST requests. Filemaker lets you create scripts to run these plugins. So, every once in a while, I run the script to check that all my outgoing links are still valid, and I also check my reciprocal incoming links, to make sure those pages still contain URLs that link back to me.
It's not exactly a speed demon, but it's all I need for "managing" my existing link relationships. Of course, it does nothing like spidering sites to find potential link partners. (Been there, done that, not doing that any more.)
Z has gotten a bad name I believe due to the possible email abuse that can send tons of emails at once. Arelis addressed that and each email is sent by itself but it is quite simple.
Arelis is also much easier to make it unique. Hope that helps but keep in mind I am a novice.
Natim you are on the right track :)
>>an awesome program.
Unfortunately that's what they said about Zeus, until it met with the heavy hand of fate and sites got creamed en masse.
>Z has gotten a bad name I believe due to the possible email abuse
No, aside from the nasty, intrusive spidering habits it got most of the bad name from a PR0 sweep that was intended to protect the integrity of the Google index from being cluttered with redundant "directories" that were no more than duplicate content with a fancy name, a heap of promotion and a wide distribution.
There were people singing praises of Zeus and tag teams working email lists, BBS's and forums galore, promoting and conducting "whisper campaigns" to spread branding left and right. They even kept it up after most of the sites with those "directories" ended up down the toilet.
And then they dogmatically denied the veracity of public statements made by search engines and reps to boot.
When our wise elders, who have our best interests at heart and have no reason whatsoever to tell us anything but what they sincerely know from their long experience, speak out and caution us, we'd be well advised to heed their advice and carefully consider.
There are very good marketing reasons for such promotional campaigns happening the way they do, particularly where there are affiliate programs involved. So we have to analyze things carefully and always consider the circumstances and the source, remembering that in the final analysis we're all personally responsible for the decisions we ourselves choose to make.
