Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Many thanks.
Create a resources page on your site that is seamless and part of the site.
Try to stay with-in your theme or close to it when giving links.
Check out the site carefully to make sure it has good content, does not link to bad places, and may be of use to your visitors.
Don't put much weight on their PR other than if it is a PRO or Gray. If it is good source, go ahead an link to it regardles of their PR.
It is time consuming to do it this way, but in my opinion it pays off in the end knowing your linking to a good source.
I've surfed webrings a lot for fonts and graphics sites - free stuff and commercial - but it's common and lucrative for that - not for shopping in general. One exception *might* be crafts areas, but even there it's low on the totem pole for traffic priorities.
>>Try to stay with-in your theme or close to it when giving links.
Close - but not too close for comfort. One thing I've been starting to look closely at lately is how close - or possibly competing. In researching sites for links for design/promotion, some sites out there look like good resources either for links or to do business, but on further examination there's a strong enough or aggressive enough connection with site developers, hosts and/or promotors/ so while that site will benefit from hosting links (or ads), ultimately the major recipient of benefits will be the ones in the site building and promoting business behind the operation.
Some are OK, some are not - it depends on how it's done. Several have gotten the thumbs down recently for just that reason with what would otherwise been excellent resources.
I think complementary and close but not directly competing is close to accurate.
So if you do join a web ring, look at the other sites in it first and make sure that you want to link to them.
Web rings don't look like a very good strategy to me, though, they seem to be mostly populated by unsuccessful/small/amaturish sites that may have some place in their niche but probably don't get much traffic.
One thing I can say is that a lot of them are really nice graphics sites done by web designers with nice portfolios. A good number of them don't do promotion on the sites, so it's not a bad way to accumulate portfolio pages for the links research bookmark folder; there's some gold to be found out there that's off the usual beaten path.
I've got a whole collection of excellent sites to contact for links for one particular site - all found through researching web rings and link pages within a certain niche. I'd never have found them otherwise, and though most aren't high PR it doesn't really matter because they're just great sites and worth linking to.
In another case, I've considered setting up a web ring for a client site I promote with those of a common interest, even though it's an ecom site. The others that would be interested in joining would mostly be potential customers for the site anyway, giving two purposes for it.
The only ones I've heard of that send even a little traffic are wholesale sites in a certain niche, and that came from people in a certain industry that's generally very big on linking and webrings. Otherwise I wouldn't join a webring except for a graphics site - not for search engine or traffic purposes.
Why not?
If the sites are useful to your vistors then why not link to them?
What's more important - PR or happy visitors? ;)
Scott
Thanks
[toolbar.google.com...]
The site you are browsing has its PR displayed on the toolbar (little green bar just right of middle).
There are also some other useful tools on the toolbar.
Scott
To get a number from the bar put your cursor on it.
You can get slightly more precision on the rank of a page that is in the Google directory, see details on the searchnerd.com web site.
