Using Robot.txt With Reciprocal Campaigns

[leaseman]

It's my understanding that gaining links through reciprocal arrangements don't carry as much seo weight as one way backlinks. Assuming this is true would it be advantageous to block the links page on my site using robot.txt so the search engines wouldn't see the reciprocal links?

[FranticFish]

You mean, cheat your link partners? :)

You can be sneakier than just blocking it in robots.txt - set up a links page where all the links are loaded with Javascript. Cloak to Google via IP range and show them that page with no links on it. The page still gets indexed and shows toolbar PR, anyone visiting it except Google sees the links.

People viewing the cache will see what Google sees (i.e. no links). You could stop Google caching the page, but that will make some people suspicious.

Savvy webmasters search Google for their partners links. AFAIK there's no way to cheat on that.

Look at it this way: if all the people linking to you did what you're thinking, what would happen to your site?

[OcalaPCGuy]

also check out the noarchive, nosnippet, nocache meta tags