Reciprocal Site Check List

[RobinL]

Any suggestions for a check list for sites which you are seeking a reciprocal link from? What should specific things should we look out for that are warning sides that they are a bad site which we don’t want links from?

[mcneely]

These are the main ones that we avoid

Pop-Up Advertising (of any kind)
Redirects
Spy-Ware Cookies
Music (written into pages)
Sub-Domains

It's good to provide your traffic/visitors with good quality links, stuff they might like and possibly remember you for.

I've tried various different ways of promoting a good link exchange program with our sites and finally had to put my foot down after all of the garbage experiences over the years

Our traffic levels are up considerably over the past few years and I can't see myself blowing it on settling for links just for the sake of having links.
So, I've gotten fairly particular

Just be picky. Don't post a link that would possibly run your traffic off. (or set out to steal your traffic) Ours is retail, so you might just guess what our policy looks like

I am really not all that jaded
It's just an effort to provide quality links or link backs in the links exchange arena

[edited by: martinibuster at 4:37 am (utc) on July 24, 2004]
[edit reason] No urls, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[moishe]

Howdy Ya'll,
Mcneely, you should probably remove that link, I think it may violate the TOS.

I have to agree with your list. I follow basically the same rules except that I can't nix site with music, my little travel site needs links and in the part of the world it covers about 1/2 of the sites put Calypso music on their sites, jeez it is annoying, but I do like getting backlinks from PR5 sites that have never heard of PR or the G toolbar.

I don't have a problem with subdomains, if used sparingly for navigation, here is what I do look for..

I do a site:www.potential-link-page-on-domain.com search on the engines and make sure their page is indexed.
I look for adult/casino/pharmacy links on their site and avoid ESPECIALY if I will be on the same page.
I look for scripts in place of URL's, I do this by going to pages they link to and doing backlink checks on alltheweb.com and more recently on msn's tech preview as well as Google of course. You can also look at the source of the page.
Another thing to watch for is framed pages with good PR showing actually framing a links page with no PR because they have their robots.txt set to no index for the links page/directory.
I avoid anything with "themeindex"!

[airpal]

Some excellent advice in this thread. However, nobody mentioned anything about using pagerank to filter out bad neighborhood sites. Would you filter out PR0 sites from reciprocal link requests? Is it safe to assume that a site with even a pagerank of 1 is ok to link to, since only pagerank 0/greybar imply an actual penalty or bad neighborhood site?

In my opinion, linking to a PR0 site that is showing a decent amount of backlinks in google, is probably begging for trouble.

So, like RobinL, I'm looking for advice from recip linking experts, in order to gather every possible factor related to an external site that could potentially cause you harm by linking to it.

[coconutz]

Be sure that they are linking out using anchor text and not just an URL. Many sites require you to post their link using their preferred anchor text and description, only to reciprocate by posting your URL for the anchor.

Really sad to see that there are those that would take advantage of someone else when claiming to offer a quality link exchange.

[chrisnrae]

Lots of new sites carry a PR0, so I don't neccessarily trash a PR0 until I've looked it over. When I still do an exchange for a quality site, I look at the site and ask myself, "Would I link to this site even if they weren't going to link to me?" - the answer to that usually answers whether or not I should be exchanging the link.

[plainsite]

Just a few that come to mind:

off topic links on page

cgi links

java links

links on a framed page

links in drop down boxes

too many links on a page

link not on the same site

pages not indexable by search engines

pages with the word "links" on the page and in url - (debatable)