Forum Moderators: martinibuster
so if someone is deliberately "not playing fair" it urks me!
i think on the whole most things are easy to spot, but when you're in a hurry some things can get overlooked.
here's a few of the cheeky tricks i've come across in the last couple of days ...
check to see if bots are excluded from the page, either with the robots meta tag in the <head> or in the robots.txt look for disallowed files in example.com/robots.txt
use of javascript, well googlebot may well be able to read simple js but from my experience she doesn't call external .js files - so check that the links aren't being written from an external .js file or if they are being a little more tricky - the links page may be absolutely fine but you may only be able to get to it through links written by an external .js file on other pages ... eg bots will never even find the page.
use of frames, a common trick is to insert a links page as a 100% frame in a frameset page, the idea being to make it look like the page has a higher page rank than it actually has.
having the links page on a seperate domain. this can also be combined with the frameset trick above and often the same links page can be served in different framesets on a whole network of sites.
so if someone is deliberately "not playing fair" it urks me!
I've had people ask me to exchange links. I post a link to them, they never put up the backlink. This has happened too many times. The funny thing is that I'll leave the link to them up if I'm getting traffic off the search engines from their keywords or domain names. This turns out to be substantial traffic in some cases.
so if someone is deliberately "not playing fair" it urks me!
This assumes that they understand the trickery... many don't.
Assuming a certain website owner is being blatantly deceitful will guarantee the loss of the link, including the lifelong visitors that pop through it.
PageRank is intangible "yes", but lifelong passed visitors and sales are really what you're after... aren't they?
A database of consistant offenders would be useful.
A database of consistant offenders would be useful.
you would probably need someone as big as AOL for all the storage.
Well I suppose that has happened with Link Farms.
I dont know about these scams - true if you are approached to exchange links then you would wish for a spiderable link in return - I do however think that it is your duty to check what link format you are likely to get. - EG - If someone says they will link to you and they do they have fulfilled their end. (no matter how they have linked).
I have never checked for that external js stunt that is very cunning.
The buggers!
His main site has a zero PR (right now anyway), log files show almost no referrals from it and my site is PR5 - and - he wants to order me about? Guess what happened to his link ;)
lifelong passed visitors and sales are really what you're after
Yep, I'll take 'em anyway I can get 'em. A few visitors here, a few there -- it adds up over a month, very substantial over a year.
"I came across your great site in my favourite search engine, Yahoo (?), and I thought the content would make it great for inclusion on my site, as we are in similar industries. We are not a FFA link farm."
The thing is, I got the exact same email like 2 secs later to another one of my, totally unrelated, sites.
Pffff.
Do you reckon that any webmasters who actually knew what a link farm was would actually fall for this spam?
An incedibly lazy way of gathering low quality links IMHO.
You know, I might actually respond to an email that said;
"This is spam. We would like to exchange links. Please have a look at our site if you have time. Thank you."
I may try that one - anyone have an email list handy? ;)
Scott
His main site has a zero PR (right now anyway), log files show almost no referrals from it and my site is PR5
I wouldn't use that for disqualifying his link. Today's Pr 0 can be tomorrow's PR5 or more :)
if I don't link to all of "them" he would remove the link he has to me.
This is a very good reason to delete his link ;) Ordering someone to put up a link is incredulous.
I've had potential link partners send me a URL for their "links page" that looked great but was impossible to navigate to from their home page.
Yeah I know a few of those Fellows :)
"I came across your great site in my favourite search engine, Yahoo (?), and I thought the content would make it great for inclusion on my site, as we are in similar industries. We are not a FFA link farm."
Do you reckon that any webmasters who actually knew what a link farm was would actually fall for this spam?
Let me assure you Scott It works wonders ;)
PageRank is intangible "yes", but lifelong passed visitors and sales are really what you're after... aren't they?
If there is a possibility of getting visitors from the site then you can sacrifice the PR. If not then getting some PR is crucial. :)
And as long as we are on this issue what are your views on automated link checking by bots. I don't like it but what do you guys think about it?
I downloaded it to see what it was like and after seeing the default template, I decided that this program was what was causing me to get a lot of spam, so I removed it straight away. I'm not going down that path!
