A New Link Exchange Scam?

It's new to me at least!

[DaveAtIFG]

I took pains with recently built sites to use forms instead of email addresses and included a link request form/page. It provides all of the code and anchor text, "Add a link to us, send us the URL, we'll review it and add your link to our site." It's kept spam and link requests to a minimum.

Most recent link requesters comply in good faith. But some frequently add their link to my site to their page of links, but it is an orphaned page. Their site doesn't point to their links page, at all. The unwary link exchanger exchanges a link with a page that is unlikely to ever be spidered. One of these sites even blocked spiders from their links page using their robots.txt file!

"Never a dull moment!" :)

[Shane]

You have to give them points for creativity!

[too much information]

You should only give links to pages that contain your link. That would solve the problem, and for most exchanges it would give a deep link which would be nice.

[jimbeetle]

A number of the requests I've received in the past few months have been like that. No matter how hard I try I can't find a path from the home page to the links pages.

It's all that foolish 'PR drain' stuff being talked about. Ain't the way it's supposed to work -- outgoing links are good -- but it's difficult to convince people of this.

What goes around comes around. Or, as they'll learn, what can't go around won't come around.

[nakulgoyal]

Indeed. And also, I am flooded with requests from links-builder.com! are people happy with their spams because of their PR?

[elklabone]

I like to see my return link no more than 2-3 clicks away from their homepage.

You could specify that you require a return link to be on a page of at least PR2. I know that PageRank isn't perfect, but if the page in question has a gray bar...

[ukgimp]

thats not bad.

What about a link exchange along the lines of.

I have added you page to my portal site (abc.com). Perhaps you could add a link to my other site xyx.com.

All well and good until you dicover that the portal site was not theirs.

Nice :)

[waynet]

I recently exchanged links and got a link on their links page which was easy to find and had an ok PR. I took a look again today and it had no PR, they had changed it so that it would go through a 302 redirect to get to that page.

From what I understand this is why it is PR0 now. Seems like it is getting harder to get an honest link lately.

[automotivetouchup]

My criteria for a link trade, after swapping for some time I get a little picky.

The site has to be in my theme(pretty strict anyway)
The site has to have pr, and my imbound link page should have pr or even a pr1 is sufficient.
No blocking of robots using robot.txt, and it has to be a straight link, no javascript links, or database query links.
The trading site has to be quality and add quality to my site.
The link directory needs to be organized in a logical directory, we reject any link trade with sites using next page directory as it is not logical to be burried 8 levels deep. Link development and trading should give you traffic, not only pr. GG may have a lot of control through SE's but a link coming from another closely related topic may warant better user/surfer interest(almost like a personal recomendation)

[automotivetouchup]

To add if they are not indexed with any pr, I keep the email as new and check it out later. An active webmaster ussually gets a pr boost by then. If not there site has to be very good and unique.