basic linking application - what would you like to see?

am i missing something?

[rfung]

I'm building an automated link exchange page - basically it asks any potential webmasters who are thinking about link exchanging with me to first set a link to me on their pages, then come to my site and fill a form where I would ask their site information and also ask where I can find my link on their page - once this is done, I add their link to my database which in turn generates the links page. Im asking for:

site name
site url
description
keywords
url of page where my link is located

is there anything else I should be looking to ask?

on the side, I thought about making this tool freely available to any webmaster who would like to automate their links as the program can be adapted to look for any websites. It wouldn't be able to create the pages automatically, but it would send am email or similar when a link back has been placed on their site. Of course nothing's really for 'free' and this would be a way for me to get backlinks to my site as the application needs to be hosted on my server. What is the general opinion on trying to offer something like this? the advantage is that it helps webmasters keep track of if a backlink has been placed before placing the link on their own sites. Or, whatever if there are any more suggestions from above. This assumes that not all webmasters are web developers :)

[guynouk]

Yeh. I'd ask if they'd link back to one of your other websites that has no connection to your site requesting the link.

[topr8]

yes great but you have to get out and offer to get links,

i have a similiar system to you but the only people who fill the forms in are people with rubbish domains actively seeking links.

[neuron]

You should compare several of the already available scripts before you build one. No sense just creating what someone else has already done, especially if it doesn't do anything more, better, or even more better (LOL).

LinksManager2, LinkAutomate, Arelis, and Zeus, or something all do this task. I think you can use each one for free for 30 days or so.

While the fields you mention are what is basically used for display purposes, there are other data fields that can be just as valuable such as a field for page rank of their home page, page rank for their page that links to you, and even how many links they have on the page that links to you, how about what category of the site, and a way to store their top keywords?

Still, if no one comes to your site, your soft just goes to waste. There is no lazy substitute for actively pursuing links with other sites.

Since it's already been done, I would suggest you write a spider script that will seek out other sites that use online link signup forms, identify them by the script they use, record their PR, their keywords, their preferred anchor text and description and contact detail. Now that would be something I could use. This would then allow you to make more efficient and productive use of your time because it would be easier to actively pursue links with this information in your hand. By finding sites that have linking scripts you have dramatically decreased the work load required to establish reciprocal linking relationships, because you know all these sites do engage in linking. Then by using the PR results and keywords of the site, you can avoid going to sites that have nothing to do with your site or near worthless sites, further increasing your efficiency and lowering your cost per link, while at the same time increasing the effective power of each link.

Good luck.

[rfung]

aw well, it was a pipe dream :) The difference between all those softwares you mention and mine is that not all webmasters want or need or can use those complex programs. And, best of all, mine would be free, which those aren't. I wouldn't care to market it as a paid product and face stiff competition from them :)

Anyway, as a web developer, I see processes that are currently done manually and try to automate them. I just love to fix or improve on them. And as they say, in affiliate marketing, you don't have to have the prettiest or more useful site - the one that gets found first by the user will suffice. Marketing is the key.

neuron, I am curious about your idea - are you saying that this script/spider has been done, or the suggestion of it has been made? if the script hasn't been done and if you'd like to discuss this further I'd like to see if I can build something like this as a programming exercise. Sticky me if interested. Or, if it has been done, do you have the name of it? in which case, the mods probably would require you to sticky me anyway.

mods: this isn't a business solicitation.

[martinibuster]

>>>mods: this isn't a business solicitation.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:21 am (utc) on June 15, 2004]

[rfung]

je ne parle pas francais. Quoi?

[neuron]

No, the linkmanager thing has been done. What hasn't been done, as far as I know, is a spider to ID potential linking partners by looking for sites that use linkmanagement software. There is software out there that will spider the engines for sites to link to based on keywords or by finding sites that link to a certain other site, but there is no switch to throw to "limit results to sites that have one of the major 5 linkmanagers installed".

There must be a way to ID all the different linkmanager softs. Therefore, you would receive a list of sites that used online forms for link exchanges and all actively participate. I find that that the softs I use to find linking partners return results from a lot of sites that do not exchange links at all, but you have to visit each and every one of these sites individually to determine this, and if these non-linkers were not included in the db, it would improve my efficiency several percent.

I'm already using custom softs to do this and might incorporate such a thing in the future. I'm already using custom in-house developed softs for some of this so don't write something like this for me, I couldn't disrespect my programmers like that. They would go bananas if I outsourced some of their work.

[rfung]

lol. cool. It would have been an interesting programming exercise.

[mifi601]

Ce n'est pas une pipe

this sentence or quote box, in effect, is truly not a pipe

the question is, was he referring to the sentence that it is not a business solicitation or was he referring to his post?

only then could we pass final judgement :)