Experience with people refusing to return links?

How do you handle it?

[cheezdoodle]

We are a well respected niche media outlet in our industry that is read, linked, respected and considered fairly influential in the business.

Recently we had to change domain names but managed to do many things to preserve our traffic and let our fans know where they can find us in the future. We've probably lost some casual fans here and there, which hurts the bottom line, but all in all we are fine and should continue to rise in the Search Engines until we get back into the Top 5 for our keywords.

To accelerate that process, we made a terrific links section that is both extremely helpful for our readers and should hopefully endear us to our fellow sites in the business that will benefit from this.

I sent out a very nice and long email to all the sites that are included in the links section explaining what we are doing, offering to cooperate further in the future, and asking for a link in return.

Interestingly enough, the top sites we contacted almost all got back to us and immediately added us to their links section. Most of them are 5's or 6's in Page Rank.

ALOT of the smaller ones, whose content is hit or miss as it is, ignored us completely and is pretty much just mooching off us at the moment with our very strong one way link. A lot of them are blogs, which aren't the most respected sources of info you can find, but I enjoy them and they seem to have a ton of links on them, which made me think that they would be responsive.

My question to you guys would be, how would you respond to that? It seems like I have 4 options:

A) Ignore them for now and hope that they come to their senses within the next month or so (it's only been about 3 weeks).

B) Email them politely again asking them whether they got my email and intend on returning a link.

C) Drop their assses like a bad habit.

D) Forget about it altogether.

[goodroi]

I'd try to at least email them again and hold firm to a deletion date. Also if you are going after blogs, you should start posting on them. Often the blog author pays close attention to the comments and will respond faster to someone they know is a reader of their blog.

[cheezdoodle]

What I was initially afraid of was TOO many people giving me links at the same time, so maybe this is actually a blessing in disguise. A lot of people were saying that adding backlinks slowly but surely is better than getting a ton in one shot, because Google might actually frown on that, raise an eyebrow, or something like that.

What appears to have happened is that we got 12-14 links, with 6-8 of them being terrific ones from some of the top sites in our niche. Now I appear to be waiting on 30-40 other guys, some important ones, some not so much (many of the blogs I mentioned above). I think I'll wait another few weeks and then send out another couple of emails, in hopes of getting 8-10 other sites to give us a link before they are removed from our links section. I won't downright threaten that, but I'll come up with a creative way to imply that, because I just don't feel like being anyone's sucker anymore, especially when we are a top site and they sure as hell aren't.

I guess Google did some kind of update this week or the week before, because I saw us move up substantially on the rankings, but not quite as high as I would like to be. That's fine because it's the offseason for us, and we still have some other plans that we're hoping will result in even better results.

[ronburk]

ALOT of the smaller ones, whose content is hit or miss as it is, ignored us completely

Ah, the illusion that email is 100% reliable. I remember getting an angry letter from a magazine subscriber once, who claimed he had gotten awful service. When I investigated, the staff member who handled his earlier mails explained "I kept answering his mails, but he kept sending more mail claiming that no one was answering him -- but I did answer him!". It was apparently inconceivable to her that someone who kept complaining that no one was answering him MIGHT NOT BE GETTING THOSE MESSAGES.

Ironically, this was a well-understood factor in using email long ago when you had to manually specify the route that mail should take to get from your machine to the destination machine. But then the domain name system arrived, and things got terribly reliable for a while -- until anti-spam techniques flourished and dropped the reliability of email back down towards 1980 levels.

Someday, I'll be selling telephones door-to-door, explaining to people "Look -- it works even when email doesn't!" :-)

[adeel shahid]

Its innovatibe thinking to wait for the other sites to respond until you drop these low PR ones that dont respond, i suggest dont drop all those non respondant only those with very low PR's while keep the higher ones as they might well link you when they see higher PR sites linking to you. But send an email to non respondants once reminding them if they forgot to add a link.

Happy Posting.

[andrea99]

What bothers me is the fact that your link page is not intended as a resourse for your visitors but as a vehicle to influence search engines.

Yes, I know that's how the world works these days, it bothers me.

I think you should evaluate the links on the basis of how valuable they are to your visitors and let the SEO chips fall where they may. Much too idealistic, I know. Just be gracious with those who don't respond.

I personally don't trade links but place them on the basis I indicated. That must be why Google treats me so badly. Too bad, I can live without Google.

[cellularnews]

I guess a lot of it depends on "why" you set up the links page.

Is it a resource for your readers - or just for SEO purposes?

Outbound links can assist with SEO - as you are linking to relevent sites and that all helps.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about not getting links back - indeed one way links seem to have higher plus points than reciprical ones, even when you are the outbound linker.