Is it a link farm?

[EasyCall]

Have any of you had experience with ***? It seems to be a categorized directory of people wanting to exchange links. There is no automation involved; you still have to manually request and post links. But you have to link to their site in order to participate and I'd hate to get a Google ban for putting a link to their site on my site. On the otherhand, it seems like a friendly place to find new link partners. Kinda like a matchmaker service for webmasters! :-)

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 3:37 am (utc) on Jan. 11, 2003]
[edit reason] no spam reports please [/edit]

[jamesyap]

I doesn't recommend participating in any link exchange scheme like linkpartners or linksmanager. I will totally escape them.

Sites that join their program are not punished by google (of my observation). But I guess google will and might have already reduce or ignore the PR vote from these domains.

Do you notice your link is posted to the linksmanager site (I am not sure with linkpartners) instead of partner. So it is linksmanager that vote to you, not your partner. And if you have 3 partnerships with then who use linskmanager, all your 3 inbound links come from a same domain name - linksmanager.com

And the 1 thing I HATE most about linksmanager is their BOT will come to crawl your site everyday for every file! It is 10 times more aggresive than googlebot! Even I doesn't partner with anyone who use linksmanager. :(

I have emailed them 2 weeks ago asking why they crawl my site as I am not related with them and I never get a reply.

Link exchange should be sincere --> It should be something like, I will check you site everyday, if you remove my link, I will remove yours. I will definitely not exchange links with them.

[steveb]

I was able to get the crawling bot to stop coming to my site -- seven visits a day, every day, taking more and more pages every day, until the day when I stopped it when the bot was looking at each one of my pages 20+ times.

Also they told me this will work in robots.txt:

User-agent: linksmanager
Disallow: *

[jamesyap]

Just afraid that having a robot.txt will fightened away other robots ...

[jamesyap]

Damn linksmanager, today it takes 100+ pages from my site, I hate it so much and immediatly setup the robots.txt to say bye bye to it.

Annoying linksmanager. just get OUT of my site!

[steveb]

james, also use the contact address on their website. They can do something internally... I don't recall what they called it, but that plus robots.txt and I haven't been bothered at all by it since.

[rfgdxm1]

>Just afraid that having a robot.txt will fightened away other robots ...

Shouldn't. Both my sites have a robots.txt that currently allows everything to be spidered and this hasn't chased away any bots.