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Reciprocal Link Partner Test
If you're looking to get click throughs from a given website, you need to ask a few questions:
- Is this a high traffic web site? Will web surfers (not other web masters) actually find and click thru my link or banner?
- Is this web site appealing and interesting enough for a site visitor to be inclined to stay for any length of time before going back to their favorite search engine (Google, MSN, Yahoo) to find another website that meets their needs?
- How organized are the link pages on this website? Will people find my link or banner easily, or will it be buried 50 levels deep or lost on a banner farm with 100 other banners?
- Does my link or banner look interesting in the context of other links or banners on the page such that someone would be more inclined to click thru to my site than another website?
If you’re looking to get search engine placement on Google or other search engines/directories that count link popularity as part of their algorithm, the best link partner site will have various qualities and lack others:
- Search engines sometimes penalize or ban free-for-all link exchange sites, especially when driven by automated links software (try Googling for searchking ban). The best way to swap links is by hand verifying your link exchange partner sites.
- Although search technology is improving, Google and other search engines prefer pure html links like http://www.orthographics.com over redirected links like http://www.site.com/page.cgi?redirect=12345 - clean HTML links will count as votes for your site.
- Make sure that the page your link will be listed on appears on Google. A quick test is to try Googling for allinurl:www.site.com/links.html or whatever the name of the links page is. If it comes up, then it will probably help your results. If it does not show in the directory, then there are several possible reasons to consider:
- it’s a new page or website.
- the site is penalized for spam, major cross linking with other web sites, or for being a link farm or other computer generated, template driven web site.
- the crafty webmaster is a cheat and does things to get you to link to him with pure HTML while your reciprocal link is:
- a redirected link or Java Script link.
- the links page is not actually linked to by the main part of the web site.
- the page has <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow"> in the header, meaning that search engines are not supposed to crawl the page.
- the robots.txt file on the site tells Google not to crawl the links page. Type http://www.site.com/robots.txt into the address bar. If a text file comes up, look for a line that reads disallow: /links-page-or-directory where the part after the slash is the directory the linkspage is in, or the links page itself. Note that many responsible web masters will use robots.txt to prevent crawling of certain pages like order forms or other areas that should not be in any search engine index.
- You could check page rank (PR) using the Google Toolbar too, but from lots of recent events it looks like it's of much less importance than it used to be. A high PR links page is a good sign when exchanging links, however, with recent events, it is not recommended to avoid linking with someone simply because the links page has no toolbar rank. Instinct and the allinurl search tool mentioned above will provide a better gauge.
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Reference:
http://www.orthographics.com/articles/
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