Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In order to get the attention of everyone who wants to see real widgets... we've sought out people who already draw the attention of those who want to buy them. We show, they sell.
We are not a commercial site, thus a link exchange seemed quite a good idea, i mean attention-wise, can't possibly think of another way that would let us go public in a more effective way ( not that it worked out actually... for nobody trusts anyone, us included :P )
The problem:
During this period, we had talked about exchanging links in this informal manner between our site and another one. We show widgets but don't sell them, they sell widgets but don't have more than like... 3 pictures so... seemed like a good idea.
The people on their end said it was a good idea as well, almost instantly, then dissapeared from sight for a month. Later they contacted us that we should proceed, we replied, then they disappeared for another month. We didn't mind actually, this seemed a bit awkward already.
They did put up something towards us... i mean it WAS a link but it was so obviously randomly edited into the site that it was... impossible to know what the *** it was doing there. And the fact that we didn't see not one referrer from that domain proves that visitors thought the same. Also the last round of communication was that they would notify us if they have put up the paragraph and the link that recommends us on the site, which did not happen. We didn't... so far we have NOT put up a link to them.
Now they're back.
After two months, they edited that two sentences into their pages =)
They've included our link on not one but three pages where people who have a thing for widgets of this kind might want to see lots and lots of pics. We checked the links, they're alright. Proceeding with our end of the deal, we put up the "since we don't sell widgets, why not try this site:" link to their MAIN page, and notice...
It has become PR0 since we first talked about link exchange.
And all its backlinks disappeared.
O.o
The site, i mean the site itself is in G, listed with like dozens of pages that have both TBPR and BLs. Including the ones we are linked from.
But the page WE are supposed to link to is... PR0 BLs 0.
Same domain... same site... only not allwidgets.com/bluewidgets/ but the root itself.
Did a little research. Back when we thought about contactig them we did our best to determine whether they were doing anything bad in terms of online marketing but didn't see anything.
But... now that we've gone to some depths we found that...
The domain... i mean the domain root index...
Is a duplicate. There is another domain, obviously for domain keyword ranking purposes or to keep the old domain active... with the exact same homepage on it.
The same company owns this domain as well, and uses it as a gateway, for this domain name is less general than the one they use now ( the TBPR 0 one ). This other version that is supposed to be the original by G, is linked from DMOZ with the old domain URL but the NEW domain name as its anchor text -.-
( might be the result of goning into a fistfight with an editor for the updates... i guess we can conclude it as a draw ;) )
Mm... So there's a site:
www.redwidgets.com
with PR4, BLs, and only 4 pages indexed...and whatever you click on this page you get taken to
www.allwidgets.com/whatever/ ... the site they use now.
Which is the real domain. Most pages well indexed. But index is... gone from G. And we're supposed to link to this one instead of www.redwidgets.com... i assume. Well actually we don't - right now, we link to redwidgets for the time being.
Can OUR site be penalized if we linked to allwidgets.com instead?
I mean if we link to the new domain, which shows the same index page as the old, and is obviously being tanked... dupe content filtered out for it? This is troublesome.
What're your opinions?
We thought of the following options, but couldn't decide
Actually we're going with the first for now
- We shouldn't link to allwidgets.com, rather link to redwidgets.com
- We shouldn't link to either, and kindly back out :(
- We can link to allwidgets.com if they'd like us to, no problem
- We should tell them about the recent dupe content and canonical issues, assist them putting up a sitewide 301 redirect from redwidgets.com to allwidgets.com, and offer other webamstering and seo bits of knowledge for free, with all our hearts, since we're so kind and have so much time. :P
- Which we are/have but we don't want to do this.
This obvious... or...
Had this little merit in answering? :P
Okay jokes aside, could anyone post me at least a single line?
So that i know i'm not on [ignore].
Is linking to a visibly sandboxed/dupe content/deindexed ( penalized? ) page on an otherwise non sandboxed/dupe content/deindexed/penalized domain dangerous in general?
