Today I was checking out a potential link partner. His links page had PR 5 so I thought it’d be a nice place to have a link to my site. Well, it ended up that his PR 5 page was built to screw link traders.

Because there are more than a few link traders out there trying to screw you, I follow a checklist when checking out potential link partners. First I check to make sure the page is indexed in google. Second I check to make sure it’s not a framed site. Third I check the robots.txt file to see if they’re disallowing the spider from indexing their pages. Finally, I check the source code of the page to see if they’re blocking spiders or if anything else sketchy is happening.

You know, it’s sad that I have to check a lot of these things, but the fact of the matter is there are more than a few link traders trying to pull fast ones. Anyway, it ended up that the PR5 page was really just pulling link pages in through an iframe. The real html page my link was going to be placed on had a PR of 0!

• Only honest link trading will help you get ahead
• A Link Checker Is Now a Critical Component In Your SEO Arsenal
• Reciprocal linking alive and well

This entry was posted on Friday, May 6th, 2005 at 2:52 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.