Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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The site is not mine. I've helped by providing advice only.
But this time, I don't know what to say.
They rarely get any link exchange requests, let alone 'legit' ones ( on topic, perfectly fine traffic exchanges ), even though they do very well for some well known queries and it's also an informative site ( ie. not commercial ). Pondering about such stuff has never been an issue.
Now all of a sudden they get a message.
It's the usual cut and paste ( or scripted ) short intro, with the mention of the site's domain, followed by *very* detailed options on how to link to the requester. No link is put up in advance.
However the site in question - the one 'requesting the links' - is the most blatantly SEO'd, and/yet one of the most successful 'authorities' on topic. And it's a pretty general theme, very popular on the internet. They've been #1-10 for everything all these years, more like an information hub than a site, having virtually no content ( ok, very little content ) other than a labirynth of internal navigation, repetitive, meaningless all-caps titles, and a swarm of inbounds...
...inbounds including one from 'our' site.
Meaning they just requested links from someone who has actually linked to them already.
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We didn't know what to say, I couldn't think up what to tell, so no response. The messages came from an SEO company anyway.
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Then they get another.
Exactly the same mail except that the indian name is now exchanged for a generic English name. And there are fewer options on how to link to them.
We chose to ignore.
( I don't know what to say )
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Then they get another two...
This time with a time difference of about less than 3 hours.
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I couldn't help but to check out the requester's website again.
Again, remember as far as Google goes, this site is a semi-absolute-authority ( mostly because of its link profile, not its content ) on a popular and generic topic. The 'links' page that I land on has a comforting robots ALL directive at the top. Right before the following TITLE/META description for the page.
title: LINK EXCHANGE
description: LINK EXCHANGE is powered by *linkexchange widget*, a powerful link exchange and web directory script. *linkexchange widget* uses *whatever* and is free for download.
Scrolling down in their code, there's a script that'll mask the links' destinations on the status bar to look like as if the *cough* PR4 link that has been promised in the 'links directory' was a direct link, while it's actually but an internal link to a redirect script. They're pretty thorough in this regard, no Google harm done, and it'll trick just enough startup SEOs who'd link for the mentioned PageRank and not because they know this site. But then what's this message all about?
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I wouldn't mind a good, on topic link exchange, especially for traffic, and especially with an authority site, I think they help the WWW go around. Mind you they are babbling about PR and not their popular nature, and even mask the links to look like outbounds, while they're not. Again, I wouldn't mind this little mistake in their rethoric, it's an authority site, on-topic, and most would be glad to get a link from the hub sitting at #1-10 for most searches, right? But on that note, I'm pretty sure 'our' site has sent them quite some traffic, while we've almost never gotten any referrals from them, even though one would think that such a well known place would be frequented by visitors. Not this section it seems.
While I've never filed a SPAM report in my life ( at least not on Google ), I'm starting to lose my nerve. I don't know what advice to give. And the site receiving these SPAM like messages is of friends' so... I'd like to be accurate. But my SEO pride is making my fingertips itch on the big red button.
What would you do if one of *your* biggest competitors kept doing this? Would you wait out, and see if they mess up on their own? Will they? After all the 'links' aren't even outbounds. Or would you take that 15 minutes it takes to copy paste this message into a SPAM report? After all they are herding inbounds. But... a SPAM report? I never did that before.
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I don't like sending in reports, and won't start sending them now, but...
But this really irks me.
But most likely I would just click on delete and move on with my day. I almost never open any email with a subject like "LINK EXCHANGE".
I haven't noticed any upsurge in the already deafening roar of link exchange requests - Google might stimulate something like that with their recent link selling vendetta, but I'm not seeing it so far. Of course, PageRank already fueled the automated link exchange industry in the first place.
But maybe not. I'm curious to know if cleaning up my site will be enough, with no outside help, to lift the 950.
p/g
It's sort of a natural link exchange. I found sites that post links to my webpages, some of which have top keywords in the page titles. I'd guess those could have the most value.
At the same time, I'd not sure about the sites which post consecutive links to several different webpages on my site. Google could consider those spammy. Mind you it's not uncommon on some article sites that Google loves.
p/g
