Do Web Rings still work?

Web Rings

[Oimachi2]

I'm thinking of joining a few web rings, do they work?

[Quadrille]

No.

However, there exceptions to this. In one or two niches, people report decent referrals.

However, they are depending more and more on silly gimmicks, and more and more rings are being abandoned.

As for SEO value; effectively zero. the links are 98% javascript, their directory is dire, and their 'home pages' have little authority.

I'd really quite like to be contradicted, but I've heard no good news for a very, very long time. :(

[Wlauzon]

They pretty much died in 2002 or so, and are pretty much a dead issue now. They worked fine with web .045 beta, but that was ages ago, in dog years.

[Beagle]

As Quadrille said, they might be useful in a few very selected niches, but that's it. I have a site in one niche where SE traffic is basically nil, because it runs on word-of-mouth and referrals. In that niche, being part of a webring that contains a respected site can be a benefit, because it can be seen as a referral from that site. That said, even in that niche I don't belong to any webrings because doing so screams "hobby site"! And while mine actually is a hobby site and a labor of love, I don't want it to come across that way. In that niche, directories have pretty much taken over the role that webrings used to fill.