Are you starting a website? If so, the first thing you begin doing after populating the content is looking for link partners. Inbound links are critical to creating awareness on two levels:
- Actual Eyeballs. Visitors on established sites see a referral to your new site and tend to click for more information. That’s the reason startups pay a premium for banners on washingtonpost.org or popular forums.
- Search Engine Ratings. Directories like google and yahoo serve as first destinations for information gatherers. People fire queries from google and expect relevant results. These results tend to exclude new websites unless already included in their index and the fastest way to get indexed is to have an array of inbound links. The more sites point to you, the higher you tend to rank in the search results.
A few years ago, most webmasters start their search engine optimization campaign by exchanging or submitting links. Others would pay for listings. It’s an expensive and time consuming process- especially when some of these inbound links tend to be dirty.
Dirty? It’s an industry term for worthless links. You can have thousands of links pointing to your site, but if they’re tainted, they won’t bring you search engine approval or actual traffic. Here’s how to tell if the site you purchased links from pulled a fast one.
Floating List – A website will charge you hundreds of dollars for top listing, but later on, you may end up not only on the end of the page, but also on subsequent sub pages. This damages your ranking because visitors may never even see your page and the search engines accord lower value to such pages. Child pages tend to have PR0. This gravely drops the ranking juice you once enjoyed. Inform the webmaster you are paying or exchanging links with that you want top billing.
Meta Tag Cloaking – Here’s a late 90s trick that relies on CGI codes to mask meta tags from browsers while permitting search engines to see Meta tags. You may be seen by the SE’s, but not by human traffic.
The Denver Page – I don’t know why they call this the Denver Page trick, but you definitely want to avoid appearing on Denver pages arising from a link exchange. Denver Pages ordinarily list a heavy volume of sites grouped by category. These pages set of spam and link farm bells; not only do visitors hate it, so do search engines.
Robots Meta Commands – Here’s a favorite of webmasters who sell links but don’t want to dilute the PR of their site. They’d place your links on their site, then insert noindex and nofollow attributes when your back is turned. You’d see your link, and so would human traffic, but you’re good as invisible to the search engines. A million Nofollow links to your site won’t get you past pagerank 0… even if they’re on PR10 sites.
Black Lagoons – You’re in the fashion industry and obtain a link on another fashion site- but they toss your link on a page with hundreds of totally unrelated links from viagra to tourism. You have better chances of being found in a messed up haystack.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it covers the most common dirty tactics. Your ranking may have stagnated over the years for this reason. Take an inventory of your link partners right now. Someone may be scamming you.
