Pages called links.html - several questions

[member22]

Hello,

I am trying to find a answer regarding links.html in the forums but can't find a good one dating back less than a 2 years ago so...

First of all I read that exchanging links hurt you as far as ranking on google ( is that true ? compare to if you don't exchange links ?

Secondly I read that to avoid this decrease in ranking naming my links.html page ressources.html or mycoolfriends.html helps ? is that true ?

The issue that i have with renaming my page is that google still come and crawl my page and sees the links ? so I don't understand how it wouldn't penalize me ?

Finally how about putting a robot.txt to my links.html page so google doesn't see the exchange of links and doesn't crawl that page to penalize me, does that help ?

Thank you,

[rainborick]

A couple of years ago, Google did set the PageRank score of pages named links-dot-anything to graybar. It seems to me that they have changed their methods to devalue a class of "artificial" links with an algorithm that looks for pages with little unique content in relation to the number of links. Whether it's one algorithm or several, I think this is why you see graybars on most link exchange pages and most web directory's internal pages. I also think they've got the dial turned up too high because it's hurting a lot of quality pages as well, but... In any case, the file name is now irrelevant.

As to link exchanges, Google's still a bit schizophrenic about them. The Guidelines prohibit participating in "link schemes". Their definition of link schemes specify "excessive reciprocal links". If you block your link exchange page via robots.txt or a robots <meta> tag, you'll certainly be safe from any penalties, but you aren't likely to find many link partners. If you want to do link exchanges with maximum safety, keep the number of exchanges very low and only link to closely-related sites. Beyond that, I don't think there are any reliable rules to follow.