Forum Moderators: martinibuster
naturally a page like that is no good at all to a human user, and its beginning to look like it may not be very tasty to a hungry spider either.
so i'd suggest scrapping the old style universal links pages, shake them up, keep anything worthwhile and put it elsewhere on the site and throw the rest away.
i haven't had a links page like that for at least a couple of years and i think they are dying fast... which means that no savvy webmaster will exchange links with such a page, so if you are persuing links and offering a link on that kind of page then no worthwhile sites will exchange with you, so you are really wasting your time.
... stick your neck out and offer a link that at least looks like it could be worthwhile and you may be amazed at how your take up rate suddenly jumps when you next go touting for exchanges, you may even get a bit of quality biting.
Link pages filled with links do nothing for the user experience and I don't care a whit about PR. I want anchor text that is descriptive and context for the link to reside in.
You're definitely on the right track. If there's a site I want to link to, surely it's worth some text for me to explain why I'm linking to the site. ;)
After the links pages penalty scare, I added meta descriptions to my site map links to make them more appealing to the spiders & users.
This is something I've been thinking about lately, and your post validates that I'm not the only one thinking about this.
I think for corporate sites you're still going to see the "Partners" pages because that's the way everybody's doing it. For the same reason you're still going to keep seeing the "Links" pages too.
I have to say that some "Links" pages send me decent traffic and I'm okay with that. For that reason alone I'm going to keep the "Related Links" pages up.
OTOH, I'm finishing up my own project related to gardening, and I plan to put discrete links within the appropriate context because it's good for the person I'm linking to and it's good for the surfer, who now has the opportunity to discover another site within the relevant context of their interest.
- Ash
Dave.
Not to mention the users - They almost expect a links page and I have to admit, if the site I'm at doesn't provide the info I came for, I might look in the links page reasoning that there'll be similarly themed sites with the info - Obviously, to be of any real use the page should be a'la directory style.
To accept, or to ask for only "in-context" links may be more work than it's worth, example; I always naturally prefer to build content with in-context links but if someone asks me to include theirs and I don't have a page to whack it in - even though it fits within the site-topic - I may have no choice but to slam it in the links page...at least for the short term.
It's my contention that Google should adopt theme-based scoring for this reason alone as links pages are not likely to go away but if webmasters were rewarded PR for staying on-topic then maybe those pages would be more useful to visitors.
I agree in principle but what's one to do when the majority of webmasters are a) lazy, and b) stuck in the links page mindset?
but i'm suggesting that you are wasting your time linking with such sites because the link back to you is worthless or may soon be anyway, so if you are looking for long term gain then you have to look beyond webmasters that behave like that.
However, a link Directory which is well organized into categories and subcategories pertaining to your niche is quite valuable indeed.
yes great point davewray, and i think that links pages organised as useful directory listings are absolutely a good thing
... i'm sure there is no universal 'right' strategy, a combination on any one site is good i think, have a directory but also on page in context links,
my point was partly that it may be better to do this (although to be honest i see little evidence of it so far) but more that i think it a much more effective strategy if you are trying to do link exchanges ... think of it the other way around, if someone asks to exchange links, wouldn't you be keener if they were offering an on page in context link rather than something buried in a universal links page, especially if you believe that the pr benefit of the latter link is very limited and maybe becoming even less limited in the future.
And thinking about these directories from google point of view I am giving a message to google that I have personally verified these sites and give them a vote.
For one site, which i look after for a client it has 4 links, hence one page, very easy to find what you want. However for another site, it has 40+ links, these are spread over optimised pages, so that all related links are tied together with 6 links being the most on any page, in essence the beginning of a resources-links directory.
I guess you would NOT want to exchange links with DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory?
I very much disaggree with your comment that link pages are a waste. We get lots of traffic from so called "waste pages"
If you run an ecommerce site and sell products what are you supposed to do put links to other sites right next to your "BUY" button?
No, you create a links page for related sites and list them there.
>am i the only one who replies "get lost"
Mmmmmm what ever happen to being polite, if that's the type of reply you send out you would be far better off just deleting the request
Also having one page with that many links is a PR floodgate if you are straight and are willing to reciprocate PR - or more to the point give rank distribution authority.
Hence what i think is being suggested, is that if you can get sites to reciprocally link with you at both base url, and on-topic page, then it makes sense to link back off the most relevant page back to them, hence pull in traffic to the site on optimised pages, that don't always need anything from your site, but will give your site a positive thumbs up as an information point.
Thinking about this, its extremely complicated.
Giving the impression to the searcher that you are truly trying to help them? and getting the reciprocal links in and out, though still opto-ing for the traffic, and hopefully by defualt gaining the reciprocated traffic / sales - from cross linked sites
>am i the only one who replies "get lost"
Do agree with Tigger, i would'nt do that - i would break into a discourse and explain my concerns, and probably give them a bit of free-be consultantcy and even land myself a bit of paid work. It's happened before.
>am i the only one who replies "get lost"
yes, was meant tongue in cheek, absolutely right i wouldn't recommend literally emailing back and saying "get lost" - no point putting someone's back up as one never knows what positives can be gained from a bit of banter back and forth.
I guess you would NOT want to exchange links with DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory?
... i think the editors of said directories would be most upset if their pages were considered a jumble of 137 assorted links, my understanding is that they order and categorise their links, thereby qualifying as a worthwhile resource.
I very much disaggree with your comment that link pages are a waste. We get lots of traffic from so called "waste pages"
no page is a "waste", and i've noticed several links pages that are (relatively) high referers to various sites where i have access to log files, so i'd agree that its possible to get traffic from links pages, my comments were meant generally.
just as i believe that people who think they have pages penalised by google because the title or filename of a page is "links" are mistaken, i think that could be one factor but not enough to trigger a "pr block" on that page, for want of a better expression.
If you run an ecommerce site and sell products what are you supposed to do put links to other sites right next to your "BUY" button?
naturally i would consider such a stategy somewhat suicidal, but luckily i know that you are not insane - just being provocative! but thats cool because the whole nature of the original threat was to be a little provocative.
No, you create a links page for related sites and list them there.
we each handle linking strategies for e-commerce sites in different ways, they are a special case (and of course a very common special case as there are a lot of ecommerce sites out there - including mine as i'm in the selling retail product business)
i'd go beyond the buy button as mentioned above, i'd never have an offsite link on a page where i'm actually pitching a customer, i believe in giving them 2 choices at that point ... "buy product A" or "go look at product B" ( again not literally as i'd have more than the 2 buttons on the page)
i'm not against links pages, just suggesting that if you are pitching for some decent incoming links on an exchange basis (and of course there are other ways to get incoming links) then try offering something a bit better than a listing on a generic links page ... the more you are offering (or appear to be offering) the more likely you get what you want too.
I guess you would NOT want to exchange links with DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory?
added as an after thought - erm why would i want to exchange links with either of the above?
firstly as far as i know neither offers any kind of link exchange and secondly to get into those directories i pay my money (Y!) or hope for the best (ODP) in the confidence that both are very well established and well used resources (at least Y! is) and as such worth either my money or time in an attempt to get an incoming link.
A links page ( called by whatever name ) should certainly take the form of an organised directory that is useful to the visitor ( or backlink hunter ) but they should all be in one place that the visitor has to make a positive decision to go to.
Surely the idea of links is to provide somewhere for the visitor to go to when he has seen enough of your site. ( although links now seem to be purely PR orientated )Putting links on all pages just encourages him to leave on a whim rather than when he is really ready.
or am I missing something here?
The reference to yahoo and dmoz were because you can find Many pages with more than 137 links on them.
what makes a good link page.
it was ...
what would intice me to exchange links with you, if you were on a recip link campaign
... this was informed by the fact that there is a continuous stream of posts in the link development forum along the lines of
"i've sent out 100's of recip link requests and no-one even replies to me, let alone wants to exchange links"
i was offering a suggestion as to how to entice quality links (by exchange) from sites, especially as i believe that in the future and perhaps the near future some links type pages will be denegrated in terms of "page rank passing on value"
please note that i don't believe that this has been implimented with specific reference to google, but it seems a logical progression for a SE to try and root out such pages as they are usually there purely for the purpose of increasing link popularity.
i'd love to exchange links with sites of high calibre such as Y! and ODP on a regular basis, unfortunately they don't often cold call me with that familiar ..
" i was surfing today and came accross your site ..."
asking for an exchange
what would intice me to exchange links with you, if you were on a recip link campaign... this was informed by the fact that there is a continuous stream of posts in the link development forum along the lines of
"i've sent out 100's of recip link requests and no-one even replies to me, let alone wants to exchange links"
I consider any site operating the ideal link philosophy gold-dust indeed.
As I said earlier, it may be more work than is deemed worthy to a lot of webmasters as you're basically asking them to either weave your link within a page they've written and are proud of (so don't want to "spoil"), or asking them to create a new page... the next best alternative I suspect is to write an article for them but will that get penalised for bein dupe content?
But you're right in that if i were being asked to participate in reciprocal linking, I'd want to see something besides just a massive Here Is A Page Of Links To Everyone That Links To Us, Who May Not Have Any Other Redeeming Features links page. Because that's not what I'd do, and we always want to get as good as we give, in these civil exchanges.
Good point, but you mabey shouldnt have started the thread off with:
"Trash Your Link Pages" ...spread your outgoing links all over your site"
To many new webmasters, that title might scare some people to panic and deleate their link pages for no reason.
as i said before it is very diffcult for ecommerce sites to:
"spread your outgoing links all over your site"
For those webmasters with sites with link pages the main thing in my opinion would be to not go crazy listing to many sites on 1 page.
You could also make a few link page categories related to your site to spread them out.
And the most important thing would be to ONLY link to site that are along the same topic your visitors might find usefull.
