Web Rings

Are Web Rings a good idea?

[Stephen Tiller]

Hi Everybody

My question is are web rings a viable strategy for building links to your website(s) or as somebody has suggested to me, bordering on Link Farms.

What are the pros and cons of building Web Rings?

I would be very grateful for any opinions, advice etc on this matter.

Thanks

Steve

[treeline]

I believe the day of the webring has mostly come and gone. For some sites with few visitors they do seem to help a bit, if it's a nice clean niche-specific ring. Others have told me about larger webrings that are mostly for SEO that don't work out, but I haven't tried any of those.

[eggypiece]

Hello!
To me they are still valuable, as they are much fun to administer and join. Currently a member of about 200 and administering 70. I have seen some backward links coming from the webrings, but in all honesty, I just enjoy learning about new sites that wish to join my rings.

[mincklerstraat]

A few years ago there was a site called "searchengineworld.com" that Brett ran (the guy that runs these forums) and wrote most of the articles for. It's not up any more, probably because the articles got so old. However, there were some real gems in there. Anyways, I remember that in one of those Brett wrote that webrings are a way of classifying your site as "trailerpark," I sorta chuckled a little when I read that.

I'd guess that much of this would depend on the specific webring, though in general when I see webrings I do think "historic" - there are so many old, old sites that still have webrings up where, if you navigate the webring links, you get a lot of 404's.

About six months ago or so I thought I noticed a resurgence of webrings, where the navigation wasn't banner-style like the webring heroes of old, but very small, plain text, often listed in the blogroll portion of blogs. Sort of like
<< stuffstuff webring >>
Haven't seen one of these in a long time though, maybe the resurgence was short-lived.