Forum Moderators: martinibuster
What are the worst tricks webmasters are playing on their partners today?
Upon closer inspection the "link" was just text css styled to look like a hyperlink which incorporated the "OnClick" command to redirect to target website.
Needless to say I didn't reciprocate. ;)
But I've had a couple that have gone the other way too:- where I have requested a mutual link by email, they never responded, but later on I found they must have just automatically added my link!
Although this had mistakenly created a one-way incoming, my conscience usually gets the better of me and I add their link...(temptation strikes!)
But this is not the case today, everyone is so dam worried about "me" that linking has become a terrible use of time simply because it just take to long to find those that "get linking" ...
Ugh!
I am fascinated.
Is there a different form of education that creates such scum bags from highly intelligent youngsters?
We still have to check over 2,000 link requests since November 14, and we usually wait to make the check the same day the following month
[edited by: GranPops at 10:28 pm (utc) on Dec. 13, 2004]
Yeah, but the good news is that they usually pull these tricks because they're either too un-talented, too un-creative, or just too stupid to create something of real value.
That's why they're doomed to exist in the lower rungs of the net, thinking how smart they are because they beat some poor hobby site out of a PR2.
Exchanging reciprocal links has never been so fraught with danger!
What other tricks are out there?
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:49 am (utc) on Dec. 14, 2004]
Its another way of being shafted, they might as well block the link to you.
Well, they frame their links page with their root, so it shows the PR of the root though it "appears" that you are on the links page.
Pretty basic, really. In the end their link frame had a PR of 3 and a google cache, so I went for it...
Well, they frame their links page with their root, so it shows the PR of the root though it "appears" that you are on the links page.
Two great variations on that theme:
1. Have a PR5-7 page and frame a geocities or netfirms page and put all the links on there. They link to your site and you're not linking to theirs, geocities is. This works a charm on webmasters who don't check the coding, simply check the link works.
2. Put the framed page with all the links in robots.txt:
e.g. have the links page:
[example.com...]
as a framed page with FRAME SOURCE:
[example.com...]
and put
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
in robots.txt Most webmasters miss this as even though they check the robots.txt file they fail to connect the dots as cgi-bin is so common to see in robots.txt and in their minds eye they are searching for the /links/ folder.
One "directory" site bought in PR for a couple of months. While they had a PR of 8 they went on a major recip campaign. They got tens of thousands of inward links and then dropped their PR buying.
Macro, what is the conlusion? Did it not work? Was it a test?
No, I'll sticky you the URL if you want but I came to know of it via a "tip" a friend sent me about a "directory where you can get a high PR link". I did a bit of searching as to how they got their PR and it seemed it was all coming from one PR9 page. As expected that PR dried up. But they were sitting pretty as they had got many, many inward links from webmasters who thought they were exchanging with a high PR site. It's unlikely those webmasters even know that this "high PR" link partner is no longer high PR but is getting all their PR from the links those webmasters kindly provided..
I am starting to wonder whether this thread is turning into a 'howto' rather than a 'BAD webmaster, bad webmaster' one ;(
Well, look at it like a 'how to avoid getting ripped' thread ;-)
@internetheaven - thanks for that!
Philosopher, that's a clever trick. If they put a "onmouseover="window.status=http://www.yoururl.com" command in there then most people may never notice that it's not an honest link.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention that part. They did exactly that. It really was a fairly slick way of doing it. I'm just to jaded not to check the source code of link partners these days. ;)
jaffstar, I'm appalled you think I did it!
I did not think you did it!, your post did not make sense to me, that's why I asked you those questions wrto your example :)
What are the worst tricks webmasters are playing on their partners today?
Not really a trick, but ju-ju...
www.example.com/links.htm
www.example.com/links/
I typically stay away from anything that looks, smells and acts like a links page. Those are probably the worst type of link exchanges to get involved with. Just the phrase link exchange conjurs up images of disdain. ;)
- Using a querystring to display pages themed to your web site. For instance, instead of linking you to www.somesite.com/page.asp, they link you to www.somesite.com/page.asp?id=subject - where both display different pages and the one you're linked on will never see the light of day unless you use that query.
- Having a link partner submit a form, getting their IP from that form, and displaying a different page that caters to what the partner wants to see when visitng from that specific IP. Although it is very unlikely that you'd see this (I saw it once, so I'm mentioning it here) this is double-edged, because they can also confirm that your e-mail is active and sign you up for lists, too.
[edited by: HyperGeek at 3:04 pm (utc) on Dec. 14, 2004]
it exists, it can be reached by spiders, but cannot be found unless you have exact url
