Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
As people here with top ranking sites will know usually there is a steady stream of email requests asking for links.
My sites are still top ranking after Allegra so could it be that people are noticing a smaller benefit for reciprocal links after Allegra? and not bothering ..or is it just me?
After reading that statement, why would (for example) a real-estate broker in the Dominican Republic bother sending a request for a link exchange to a European travel-planning site?
I'm guessing that the remainder tables at Barnes & Noble are stacked high with a five-year-old book titled SEO FOR DUMMIES, and its readers are cranking out doorway pages and stuffing keywords between meta and alt tags at the same time they're lecturing other Webmasters about the benefits of transferring Google PR via link swaps.
We have visited your web site and feel that your site fits perfectly with the profile(s) we are looking for in a partner for their site.;)
More of this junk coming in on our end... I was just joking about it this AM ha!
I guess it was just a hiatus after allegra.
Everyone was probably too busy typing in their keywords like cazy and analysing the SERPS to bother with sending out pesky emails...
EFV,
The increase you are seeing could be because your network did quite well out of Allegra? ;)
Cleanup, I hadn't thought of that, but you're probably right. I guess there's a cloudy side to every silver lining. :-)
----- Original Message -----
From: [Spammer]
To: [real estate franchise]
Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2005 10:56 AM
This is the absolute worst [real estate franchise] web page that I have ever seen. You
definitely need links to your listings for sale. I was interested in buying
through [real estate franchise], but not after viewing your web page
:)
This guy may behave this way because his spammy pages are ranking well. Just like this page, which Google now lists above my site (and many other relevant ones) for the "keyword1 keyword2" query. This winning page has a title that is right on target: "Reciprocal keyword1 keyword2 links". C'mon, Google!
I haven't read every message in this post but wanted to ask about something.
When I search for my "sitename" in Google (not sitename.com) I've noticed that I have around 8000 or so returned items listed. This is way up from the last time I looked which was 2 or 3 months ago which was maybe 3000.
I've found a number of German sites that have a link to my site on every page of their site(s). These sites are named like so: site1.info site2.info and on up to site22.info.
Then I noticed that there is a whole bunch of other sites created in the same way: anothersite1.info -> anothersite22.info and again links on every page.
Upon looking some more I found a number of cooking sites, bicycle sites and you name it and my link is on there site. I didn't and wouldn't have put my link there. These websites are basically a bunch of links to other websites with no real info except for couple of lines of description.
Could these links cause problems for mysite from Google’s viewpoint?
I don’t have any links back to these sites and didn’t ask for any of these links to be placed on these sites. If this does cause a problem what would you do to “fix” it?
Thanks
Since Allegra I notice a marked drop in emails asking for link exchanges..
Probably has something to do with all the rumors floating around different message boards that recip links have been devalued by Google. That and the rumor about the sandbox being caused by unatural link building paterns.
Then there's the dread 301 redirect, but I'm guessing that doesn't apply here....
Thank you for your reply :)
However, I'm also starting to get requests by people who wants to buy text links from our pages by the month. And that is much more interesting.
Yea, you've never been there or you would have added your own link.
My personal favorite was a gigantic links page with all sorts of clearly autogenerated links. They even had one with the site title "404 Not Found".
And then there was the one that had legit titles and descriptions, but all the links went to the same page on another domain. The email bragged about a PR5, but the links page was unranked. I actually took the time to respond with a "what kind of idiot do you think I am?" message.
I'm confused, isn't "getting links" still decent SEO? Or am I missing something? Link farms and such are bad, obviously, but are relevant link exchanges bad?
EFV
I'm confused, isn't "getting links" still decent SEO? Or am I missing something? Link farms and such are bad, obviously, but are relevant link exchanges bad?
I have trouble understanding what's relevant about a link from a European travel-planning site to a real-estate broker's site in the Dominican Republic, but maybe I'm missing something. (How do you keep them down on their link farm in Santo Domingo when you're writing about Paree?)
And yes, maybe "getting links" is still decent SEO (I don't claim to be an expert), but one would think the person doing the SEO might take a hint from the paragraph on the "Contact us" page that explicitly says: "We aren't interested in 'reciprocal linking' or 'link exchanges'--we link for editorial reasons, not to boost rankings in search engines."
Side note: In addition to lecturing me on the PR benefits of link exchanges, a number of the recent linkee wannabes have provided the annotation text that they wanted me to use. Some have even included logos. Next they'll be trying to charge me for the privilege of linking to them. :-)
