Have Heard Google Excludes Links on Pages Named links.htm

Is this true?

[adeelshahid]

Hi there,

I have heard that google is excluding links from links.htm like page as those type of page's are purposly built for link exchanges.

Regards,
Muhammad Adeel

[jchampliaud]

Where did you hear this at?

[adeelshahid]

In a book i heard about links.htm pages getting excluded from from google's cache its a well reputed author that said about this i can't mention his name or identity but he said he heard it somewhere so i here just wanna confirm at webmasterworld because its the place for the right things.

[martinibuster]

Around three years ago many links and partner pages went gray bar. Even IBM's partner page went gray. The gray disappeared but the experience left an impression.

Afterwards many webmasters made it a practice to name their links pages most anything but links. Like a story that is passed along from person to person and changes into something completely different, I think that experience has caused the practice of not naming a links page links.htm has inspired numerous interpretations of the reason why, with many people not even knowing the real story behind it.

It's like the tradition of seeking PR 4 or above links. Webmasters do that without knowing WHY the number 4. There is a reason, but the reason is so mistaken it falls into the realm of urban legend and myth.

I don't think it makes a difference what your links page is named. It's too simple to target a links page, and it would wipe out any number of web pages from .edu to .gov and beyond- clean non-seo pages that are of the highest quality. There are too many legitimate reasons to have a page called, links.

Of course, it probably doesn't hurt to call your links page anything else. ;)

[JollyK]

Hm. I have a whole links directory with the word "links" in the URL of every page, and they're all a minimum of PR4 from what I can see with several PR5. There might be a problem with "links.htm" or "links.html" but I certainly have no problem with "links" on my site.

JK

[CainIV]

Most likely SEO myth unfortunately, which is rampant

[anallawalla]

I have two sites with links.shtml or links.htm since 1998/2003 and they have not gone greybar. If there was a ban on links.htm, there must have been more to it than a file name.

[martinibuster]

Anallawalla,
Here is the thread for the links pages gone gray incident that I referred to. This didn't happen to all sites. It was a random thing. As mentioned above, I even saw it on IBM's partner web page. The incident lasted a week or two I think.

May 19, 2003
link pages being removed?
site has good PR, links page has PR0 or not indexed
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Sweet Cognac]

I remember that martinibuster, and in response started naming my link pages to /websites.htm and /resources.htm, etc. In fact I still do, I don't think I'll ever call them links pages again.

[getxb]

Does the words 'resource', 'sites', 'partners' do any harm? Is this excluding of pages like links.html a result of any filter?

Regards,
getxb

[martinibuster]

I don't think that anybody "knows" for certain if naming those in that manner will cause the search engines to deprecate those links or whatever. Maybe someone does, but I'll be honest, I don't know for certain. If you want to be paranoid then veer away from those naming conventions.

Some of what we do has more to do with parnoia than fact. But if a webmaster feels like someone is after t hem, can they be blamed for being extra careful?

[Crush]

Even if they do or do not. Here is how easy it is to spot:

1 link to a page full of external links = a links page.

3000 external links to a page full of links = a valuable resource that people link to.

If everyone started to linking to everyones links pages then they would be seen as valuable resources but the fact is there is usually one hidden link on your site somewhere.