Top Dirty Linking Tricks
By Lee Roberts (c) 2006, Rose Rock Design, Inc. http://www.roserockdesign.com
Part of achieving top search engine positions is through links from other Web
pages. These links can come from people who like your site (natural links),
reciprocal linking, directory
submissions and a few other ways.
The goal of trading links is to get quality links for quality links. True
quality links will carry benefits far beyond that of attaining a coveted
position in the search engine results. The links will bring traffic from the Web
page linking to your Web page. Therefore, you want to ensure you trade or barter
links from quality partners.
Sometimes it's hard to determine who is a quality linking partner, even for the
expert. So, how can you tell if your
link is on a Web page where its value will not be very good?
The short list below highlights ways of diminishing or nullifying the value of a
link to your site from another Web page.
Meta Tag Masking - this old trick simply used CGI codes to hide the Meta tags
from browsers while allowing search engines to actually see the Meta tags.
Robots Meta Instructions - using noindex and nofollow attributes let's the
novice link partner see the visible page with their link while telling the
search engines to ignore the page and the links found on the page. Nofollow can
be used while allowing the page to be indexed which gives the impression that
the search engines will eventually count the link.
Rel=nofollow Attributes - this is not a real attribute based upon HTML
standards, but rather it is an attribute approved by the search engines to help
identify which links should not be followed. This attribute is often used with
blogs to prevent comment and link spam. The link will appear on the Web page and
in the search engine's cache, but never be counted.
Dynamic Listing - dynamic listing is a result of having links appear randomly
across a series of pages. Each time the link is found on a new page, the search
engines count consider the freshness of the link. It is extremely possible that
the link won't be on the same page upon the next search engine visitation. So,
the link from a partner displaying rotating, dynamic link listings rarely helps.
Floating List - this can be easily missed when checking link partners.
Essentially, your link could be number one today, but as new link partners are
added your link is moved down the list. This is harmful because the values of
the links near the bottom of the list are considered to be of lesser value than
the links at the top. With the floating list, it is possible to have your link
moved to a new page whose PR value is significantly less or non-existent and the
new page may not be visited and indexed for months.
Old Cache - the caching date provided by Google indicates the last time the page
was cached. Pages with lower PR values tend to high PR values. If the cache is
more than six months old, it can be surmised that Google has little or no desire
to revisit the page.
Denver Pages - while Denver, CO is a nice place to visit, Denver Pages are not a
place you want to find your link in a trade. Denver Pages typically have a large
amount of links grouped into categories on the same page. Some people call this
the mile high list. These types of pages do not have any true value in the
search engines and are not topically matched to your site.
Muddy Water Pages - these are dangerous and easy to spot. Your link will be
piled in with non-topically matched links with no sense of order. It's like
someone took all the links and threw them in the air to see where they land.
These are worse than the Denver Pages.
Cloaking - cloaking is the process of providing a page to people while providing
a different page to search engines. You could be seeing your link on the Web
page, but the search engines could possibly never see the link because they are
provided with a different copy. Checking Google's cache is the only way to catch
this ploy.
Dancing Robots - this can be easily performed with server-side scripting like
PHP and is rarely easy to catch. In this situation people that attempt to view
the robots.txt file receive a copy of the robots.txt file that does not include
exclusion instructions for the search engines. However, when the search engines
request the robots.txt file they receive the exclusion instructions. With this
situation the links pages will never be linked and you'll never know why without
expert assistance.
Meta Tags and Robots.txt Confusion - which instructions have the most weight?
Don't know the answer? Shame. Search engines do. If they conflict, the page Meta
tags are typically considered the rule to follow.
Link the Head - while these links do not count in the search engines and do not
show up on the Web page, they do get counted by scripts or programs designed to
verify the links exist. These programs only look for the URL within the source
codes for the Web page.
Empty Anchors - this is a nasty trick, but can be an honest mistake. The links
exist and are counted by the search engines, but unfortunately are neither
visible nor clickable on the Web page. So, there are no traffic values from the
link.
The goal of trading links is to trade them for equal value. Understanding the
ways people will attempt to prevent passing a quality value from their Web page
to your Web page can help you avoid these useless links. If your link partner
pulls under- handed tricks the links they trade you are useless.
While you may never be an expert in knowing all the latest tricks, traps and
tests, you can now become an expert in knowing the thirteen mentioned above.
Ensuring your link partners are not following or using these tactics can help
improve the quality of links you gain from other Web pages. By having quality
links pointing to your Web page you will gain additional traffic through organic
search engine results and visitors driven directly from your linking partners.
About the Author
Lee Roberts, The Web Doctor®, is President/Founder of Rose Rock Design, Inc.
(http://www.roserockdesign.com) a website design Pie Shopping Cart (http://www.applepiecart.com),
an ecommerce shopping cart (http://www.applepiecart.com).
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We will tailor your website to rank higher in any search engine, but we
specialize in the biggest engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Our
Client's smile as they watch their website raise in search engine rankings
for the Keywords and Phrases that drive business to their virtual door!
the
Internet the work we have done to optimize your website for
the
best keywords and phrases in your market area will ensure they will find you
regardless whether they are using Google, Yahoo, MSN or any search engine! 