I’ve mentioned the value of honest link trading in a previous blog. And I still stand firmly in the position that honest link trading with theme related sites is the best way to go. But sadly there are many link traders seeking an easy way to get one way links. Out of 1200 link trades I’ve made on one of my sites a full 25% of the link traders try and cheat. Now more than ever I recommend a solid link checker for your link directory.

Lavaball uses a link checker that checks to see if the link is on the page, if nofollow is applied to the link or is anywhere on the page, and it checks the robots.txt file for file or directory disallows. With hundreds of link trades, who has time to manually go through and check each link? Now I can easily track down the disingenuous link traders and either get them to comply with decent link trading, or remove them from my directories.

Here are a few of the link trading schemes I’ve scene lately. More than a few link partners will create a link directory, trade with numerous sites and a couple months later delete their whole directory. At that point all of the link partners that do not check their links or have a link checker are giving one way links to this site. I have scene sites that place nofollows on all the links in their directory. Nofollow tells the spider not to follow a link thus you will never get weight or credit for your link on their site. I have also scene robots.txt files that tell the spider not to go into the link directory pages. And of course their are a number of other tricks.

To prevent your site from becoming a one way link directory to link trade scams I would definitely recommend getting a solid link checker for your link directory. Lavaball is currently developing a FREE link checker that will be available for your download soon.

• Deleting Link Directories is Not Cool by Adam Sorensen
• Link checkers can get your link deleted - By Adam Sorensen
• LavaLinx is the future of link trading

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 7:56 am and is filed under Link Popularity, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.