Webrings

Do they increase my SE position / PR

[consolepassion]

A competitor of mine has recently shot up on Google for the keywords we both compete on. I've looked at his site and I can't find any changes *except* the site seems to have joined lots (20+) webrings recently.

Is there any advantage to this? I have always been wary of Webrings due to the 'link farming' arguement, and I am not 100% sure where Google stand on them.

The Webring code is contained in Javascript, so theoretically should be ignored by Google, thus preventing any PR from my site being lost - am I correct in assuming this?

I guess what I am asking is:

Would adding my webpage to these webrings do any harm?

The traffic from these sites would be minimal (but hey, any traffic is good right?), it's the effect on my PR and SERPS I'm concerned with.

[troels nybo nielsen]

> Would adding my webpage to these webrings do any harm?

Quite frankly I don't know. But they might. And if they don't do now they might in the future.

Let's try to look at it from a human user's perspective. Then the question must be: Does membership of a particular webring add to the value of your website?

This is very much a question about the quality of the other websites in that webring. If they are generally of a significantly lower quality than your own then you must be prepared that being in their company will downgrade your website in the eyes of your visitors.

In questions about the quality of a website Google try to adopt the views of the human users. They may not always be succesfull, but that's what they try to do. If you consciously put your website in company with inferiour websites you should be prepared for the eventuallity that Google degrades your website.

Being member of *many* webrings looks like spamming in my eyes. Google may agree with me. If they do they will not necessarily give penalties but may just not let those links have any value.

Membership of many webrings may also raise a flag and if some other flags are raised by other kinds of questionable SEO that may be enough to give you a penalty.

[abates]

I'd be sceptical of getting much value at all from Webrings. You have no control over which sites you will effectively be linked from, and so it's pretty much a crap shoot.

Plus you'll get fairly useless link text like "next site" and "previous site" :)

[Marcia]

I'm acquainted with a lot of the type of people who traditionally do a lot of link exchanging with each other and also at one time did a lot of webrings. However, word got out and a lot don't any more - I've never heard any say they got any traffic whatsoever from web rings. Yet there are some who do get some fair traffic from links on other sites in the niche.

They don't help at all with rankings that I've ever heard of or seen. One thing that might be OK is that if one is on a links page there's an outbound link to a site on a related topic. Also, it *might* be OK if someone does SEO and deliberately sets out to pull in traffic and try to send some traffic out to the ring members - but I haven't seen that yet except for one or two that also run banner exchanges. I've seen stats from a site in that one and still didn't see traffic from it.

The one who benefits from the webring is the ringmaster, who's got the page on his/her site that all the others link to.