Site of the Day recip. links

What about PHP based recip links?

[ir8Rtist]

Rather than have just a links page, I thought about putting a box on our home page that has a list of 3-5 sites pulled from a PHP database at random. These sites would have related content of course. I would also include a link to request to apply to be a sotd.

I'm new to SEO so forgive me if this is a spammish cardinal sin that I speak of, but my question is: is it? and would a php link system like above work?

[topr8]

hi welcome to WebmasterWorld

no that wouldn't be spammy, but if you are doing it instead of exchanging links why would anyone want to link with you if all they got was a random(occasional) placing on your front page?

or have i misundertood your point?

[ir8Rtist]

That's a good point.

I'm just trying to figure out a way to place the recip links on our home page because its my understanding that that would be better for improving the PR of the overal website.

Basically we are a pc utility software developer and i want to start creating recip links to pc mod and overclocking sites. Is a basic old fashioned links page the best route?

[topr8]

actually if you put the external links on your homepage it will decrease the overall pr of your sub pages as some of your pr from the index page will have passed onto your external links instead of to your own internal links.

a good old fashioned links page is not great either - i would create a mini directory so you can group your outgoing links by theme, eg. overclocking etc.
put the directory in a folder and link to the index page of the directory from your homepage.

the advantage of this is that you will have less links on a page which will make it more attractive for others to want to exchange links with.

i'd advise against calling any of the pages "links.htm" or titling the pages in the same way

[ir8Rtist]

Thanks for the great advice. Sounds like a sound way of doing it. Would it be better if I broke the links into categories and made each category a separate htm document?

Would these links be adversely effected if I put them all into an SQL database and generated them on the page dynamically? I've heard conflicting information about Googlebot and its dealings with PHP.

Our current home page has a PR of 6 and I'm trying to boost it up at least to an 8 or 9.

[rogerd]

Welcome, IR8rtist. Yes, making smaller, themed groups of links on individual pages is better.

There's nothing wrong with using PHP to generate your links pages on the fly, but query string URLs seem to fare less well in Google. Instead of /links/linkpage.php?category=vegetables, make the URLs look more like /links/vegetables.html . And avoid using "links" as much as you can, too, since at times "links pages" seem to have been downgraded. Of course, boosting the PR of your links pages is primarily for the benefit of your partners, though I have had some that generated good traffic.

Lastly, to get your site up in PR, the main thing you can work on is getting outstanding links to your site. I.e., messing with your content won't bump you up a point or two. Getting links from other sites will. Note that PR9 is an almost unattainable goal for most sites. Because of the logarithmic scale, each point increase is much more challenging.