Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In addition, I think the extra load on other websites might be a tad rude - though that's another topic ;)
90% or more of the sites that *did* put up links to my websites, now removed them.
Nope, not a glitch, in their place on several sites, were other, newer sites that are competitor's of my websites. :) Cute, eh?
Of course, I now removed all the offensive links because I'm interested in trading traffic, if they don't have a link to me, I can't get traffic from them :(
We've all been there before (at least, I guess we have) so I wonder: What did you do when this happened? Obviously, these are NOT the type of webmasters I"ll be exchanging traffic with in the future.
Short of a cron job wiht a perl script to go checking all the sites that link to me, what do you suggest to make sure that these other webmasters stay honest?
I don't (yet) have an automated system to monitor things like this.
Very good. I hate when others keep automated systems which monitor these things. Personally never link with them bcoz if all started such monitoring what happens to my server load?
One of the important things I look for is how the other site is managing the links. Pure gold links are obtained from like minded people who give links through content. Extremely difficult to get. And very rarely do they take out your links. They know the importance of Reciprocals.
Next comes links from directory like pages which some site maintain. At the very least it shows that they are organized. So I get links from them. Then come the link pages.
Many around here go for recips from Traffic point of view. Also helps with themes and all. I try to get links from other sources also. Doesn't help from traffic perspective. Ranking perspective yes!
Regarding what to do if link partners remove your links? First a polite email. If no positive response then I would delete their links. Wouldn't like to have a relationship with ppl who do not honor their word. :)
Very good. I hate when others keep automated systems which monitor these things. Personally never link with them bcoz if all started such monitoring what happens to my server load?
Depends how often you check. Every fortnight? once per month? Nothing wrong with this - better than checking by hand.
It's easy to write a script to check and you can run this manually if you prefer.
I have checked a lot of my links by hand and it is time consuming. I did find most of my links (the vast majority) still in place. What time frame are you talking about in losing 90% of you links?
menton
Depends how often you check.
Yes very true. I know some overenthusiastic fellows who check every hour. Once a month seems reasonable ;)
Regarding the "polite email" as a lot of them were swapped with competitor links, I just went ahead & nuked their links ;) It just didn't seem worth my time to go & email & say, "gee, did you trip & delete just one of your hyperlinks to replace it with a competitor of mine?"
What I'm going to do now, is to check the links every month, just set aside some time, write a bot that will do it, and make the bot go politely. Excessive server load annoys me as well, so I'm going to make sure it's a _polite_ crawler that I put together.
That way, if I forget, it's easy enough to run the application & get my results back. It just bugs me that I have to go out to look at this kind of thing, and find out people disappointed me.
Funny thing is, though, my sites haven't really changed in ranking - because they have better links, as you said, that aren't reciprical but directory style placement.
Dave.
Dont quite see what is so bad about that. If someone wants to trade links with you then putting one up first seems like good sense and common curtesy.
Or am I missing your point?
My favorite trade was one where the guy signed all of his emails "May God bless" and then after the trade promptly put a "noindex" metatag on his links page!
I've had people email me your link is up at so and so page, when it really wasn't. I think they count on a certain percent of people not really checking. Then of course there are the people who ask for reciprocal links first when all they really want is to harvest your email address. So they not only don't return the link, to add insult to injury then they start spamming you.
If you don't have automated software, then I've found it pays to just keep a master list of reciprocal link trades and then check them againts the backlinks for your sites in alltheweb and altavista every once in a while. I personally would not take the time to write to people asking why they dropped my link, most of them drop it to increase their own PR so they are not going to write you back and tell you that anyway.
