There has been a practice that has become more and more common amongst SEO spammers that you should be aware of - especially if you do not have a link checker for your link trading pages. And I hope I’m not giving anybody ideas by telling you about it. But I rather be a voice of warning, and hopefully help a number of traders from being taken advantage of.

Anyway, there are a number of webmasters out there that have no intention of reciprocating a link, at least not over the long term. Here’s how the scheme works. They use a reciprocal link trading system like linkmaket.net - which has over 30,000 users now - and they trade links with thousands of websites. They put up links to these thousands of sites in their link pages or directory. Everything is all on the up and up at first. But then, after a couple of months, these webmasters delete all of their link pages or directory. Why would they do this? Because now all the reciprocal links have turned into one way links to their website. Sure there are a number of webmasters with link checkers that will see this and delete the one way link, but there are thousands of webmasters without link checkers that will now be pointing a one way link to the disingenuous webmaster. This practice is definitely not cool in my book.

Now that Google has put even more weight on one way links it’s not hard to imagine that things will get worse. I would highly recommend a link checker of some sort if you do any link trading. Otherwise, chances are a number of your reciprocal trades are going to turn into one way links to insincere webmasters.

• Link Building and Link Trading Tips by Adam Sorensen
• The Advantages of RSS for SEO by Adam Sorensen
• Planning a Good Site Development Strategy

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Design Tips. 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.