One way links

and robots.txt...

[malasorte]

Hi all,

I always read that one way links to your site are very important. Most links to my site are reciprocal, and I do pretty good in the search engines.

I was wondering if it is possible to cheat in link exchanges, to get one way links. I'm not planing do to this myself, I just want to know if people actualy do this:

The ideea: you do a link exchange, you put his link on your page, but your links page is disallowed to search bots by means of robots.txt. In these way the search engines see that you only have one way links to your site, when in fact all the links to your site are reciprocal.
Is there a way to prtect against this (except looking in the robots.txt of every site you exchange links with)?

[jimbeetle]

Sure folks try to do that. Plus meta noindex, nofollow; rel=nofollow, a whole host of "tricks" that are about as sophisticated as a...well, they're just plain dumb.

And no, as a matter of checking out sites with which you want to exchange links, there's nothing like old-fashioned detective work.

[martinibuster]

Unfortunately, you do have to protect yourself nowadays by checking the robots.txt, and looking at the code to see if they're hiding a redirect with a JS trick, etc.

It's a dirty world out there.