Forum Moderators: open
teeceo.
[edited by: Marcia at 7:56 am (utc) on July 10, 2002]
[edit reason] specific reference removed [/edit]
We generally avoid discussing or recommending (or not) specific unknown sites, since there are so many of them. I did look though, and several times the Javascript pop-unders froze my browser so that I almost had to turn the computer off, it was even difficult to get the browser window to close. That indicates to me that it would be very difficult for them to send any direct traffic from their site, so the only consideration would be PR.
I could not access the main page at all to see the PR with IE, I had to copy and past the URL of a lower level from NN with JS turned off. Their main categories appear PR 4, which is no indication of what the lower levels are, except it's a reasonable expectation that they'll lose 1 for every level down - in addition to many links on each page.
It was impossible to tell the PR, because they've got all those pages forced into a frameset, even with right clicking to get to them. As soon as that's done, it's suspect that there's something to hide.
Looking with no JS, the actual listings are, in fact, two levels further down from the secondary category pages. If they've got any PR at all, the highest it could possibly be is PR3, and somewhere between PR0 and PR2 is more than likely, since we're being prevented from seeing them and they are deep into the directory structure.
A site worth linking from or to should have value that's easily and readily visible, and that was not at all the case. I'd definitely pass on any site that's forcing pages into framesets, or anything that's making it difficult to see what's doing with the pages, particularly the Page Rank.
[edited by: Marcia at 10:07 am (utc) on July 10, 2002]
Also, some are remotely hosted and/or dynamic, so that has to be considered, as well as looking to see if there are a lot of questionable entries on the page already.
I just put noindex,nofollow on the guest book page of a site I'm doing a little work with and pulled a bunch of outbound links off the links page, too. So this is coming from a very conservative approach. I'd have to say to be on the safe side, approach it with caution and moderation.
Be on the lookout for link farms, themeindex (titled) pages, and Zeus-type directories. Linking back to these can get you some heavy penaltys and may even get you banned, either for a few months or for good.
It doesn't matter right now if the directories have only a few relevant links or hundreds of categories. Maybe when Google gets everything together they will be able to distinguish the difference but right now it's penaltys all around. :(
Trust me, coming back from a penalty is hard work and a long haul.
Ann
teeceo.
