Link Thievery

Things to look for when interlinking with other sites.

There are essentially two kinds of dishonest webmasters:

1.. In Reciprocal Linking the aim is for two webmasters to look at each others sites, and then, if they agree, to swap links with each other.

As you know, the Google press for one way links has meant that a whole tribe of web masters have become nothing but thieves.

They steal PR (Page Rank) promised to you from their site to gain more PR for themselves.

In a reciprocal link exchange you are both expecting to receive PR from the others site, so if one site pulls the rug from under your link, they have effectively stolen from you.

They are nothing but dishonorable and ugly people who have no respect for how their behavior affects others.

2.. The next kind of extreme dishonesty, is in three way linking.

Here one webmaster approaches the other and tries to convince the other of how much better it is for them both to link this way.

Three way linking, 4 way linking, all work on the principal that you agree to link from A to B, and the link is returned from site C, not from B. They believe that this will be seen by search engines as two one way links - one way to B from A and one way to A from C. This is thought to be better for PR, as they believe one way links carry more PR than reciprocal links.

Both webmasters should know it is cheating and dishonest.

They know they cant get the PR they want easily, so by engaging in 3 way linking, they cheat their way in front of honest web masters.

Again they don't care. They don't respect others, only their own self interest.

They are indeed just the ugliest people.

What to Do?

So, my suggestions to you are that I am going to show you how to identify the reciprocal link uglies, and just avoid any offer OTHER THAN good old reciprocal linking.

Remember, these web site masters are ugly ugly ugly, they will cheat on you just as soon as it is in their own self interest to do so. They have no honor, no respect, no love, only their own greed.

Matter of fact, if anyone is trying to entice you into improper 3 way linking or similar, forward their emails onto admin@google.com and let them know what these terrible terrible people are trying to get you into. Let Google deal with these nasties, these 3 way linkers.

Remember, if you are linking with 3 wayers or worse, Google will eventually find you of course on their own, whether someone reports you or your partner sites.

Also, ever thought how easy it would be for a webmaster to set you up and report you to Google!

Now the way to tell if your reciprocal link web master is a nice guy, or an ugly guy who is into link cheating.

1... Ugly puts a nofollow attribute either in their reciprocal link to you, or in the robots tag at the top of the page. Look for the nofollow and see if it will affect your link back. The tag nofollow is telling the search engine not to give that link or links any PR back. You do this by checking the source code of the page (right click on the page, click on view source code). You will be looking for something like this <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> or something like this <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com" rel="nofollow">

2... Ugly puts a nofollow in the other pages leading to the reciprocal links page you have your link on, so that the page wont be valued by the search engine, so search the pages that lead to your link to make sure they are all passing the PR to your page. So you have to check the source code of each page leading to the one with your link.

3... Ugly uses javascript to hide your reciprocal link from search engines. For example <a href="http://" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/?ref=http_//www.cholesterolcholestrol.com/
cholesterol_and_health_web_portal/admin/links_link_suspended.php');"> How should it have looked <a href="http://www.cholesterolcholestrol.com/">

4... Ugly puts your reciprocal link on a page that is not connected to by any other page, effectively stopping anyone from finding it, and presumably stopping the PR going to you as well. A general rule of thumb, if you cannot find your link navigating from the index page of the site it is suppose to be on, ask the web master how to navigate to it from his index page. Don't just accept the url of the page it is on.

5... Ugly uses a .htaccess file or a robots.txt file to stop the search engines visiting the reciprocal link page holding your link. To try to access these files, go to the folders that contain your link page Eg. type in the search bar eg "http://www.theirdomain/robots.txt" and also "http://www.theirdomain/.htaccess" and check them to see what their robots or .htaccess files say. For example, Ugly could "disallow" search engines from even looking at the link page.

Other things you can do to catch the ugly reciprocal link cheaters who get through your checks

To catch the ugly web master that you cant catch yet, you can reconcile those in your reciprocal links pages to those that the search engines see.

If you use Google webmaster tools, check ALL incoming links to your pages - that is the external page links. If a suitable time, say 8 weeks has lapsed, and the site linking to your site still isn't showing up as linking to you, then look at checking out the link again and dumping it, or you can wait for a few more weeks to see if it'll show up... In one afternoon, I've removed several hundred reciprocal link uglies doing this.

Also, using Google web master tools, did reveal to me a  new pattern of link cheating I hadn't been aware of before.  Where one site collects your link and offers to automatically reciprocate links from about say 7 other sites if you provide links to all 7 of theirs, sounds good and convenient. Google tools showed me I only had one link from one of their sites. So they were only putting your link on one of their sites, even though when you try to add your link manually to each site the auto response on each of the 7 sites states that your link is already there, and their search links feature reveals your link as being there as well, though not's it's link page url on their site, they also wouldn't reply to my emails about where exactly url wise I could find my reciprocal links back.  So they were actually pulling 7 links from webmasters and only giving one back.

Another thing you can do that may suggest an ugly web master, is they have exceptionally high PR, but the directory still has a greyed out google PR bar area. It's not uncommon though for even legit web masters to have it greyed out though - so don't jump to conclusions. BUT, with carfeul checking you will often find that you are dealing with an ugly web master, one that has likely used one of the five ugly strategies above.

A Warning on Using Google Tools to Catch Link Thieves.

Nothing is perfect, you may lose an odd honest link that somehow wasn't picked up by Google.

Two of my personal stories on the ugly link cheaters

I recall a charity that used cars as a gimmick, I was exstatic to find this real high PR site was so easy to engage in reciprocal link exchanges with, found them in one of those paid directories you join to find other web masters who want to trade reciprocal links. When I checked out why their links pages were all greyed out, I found the "nofollow" tag. Don't assume honesty in any webmaster, even those running charities.

Another example is when I paid to get into one of those link directories of webmasters who want to exchange links. The sad part to this, when I notified the link directory I paid, they ignored my online support tickets. In fact, I estimate around 90% of that popular link directory was comprised of ugly web masters. I stopped using it after about my 55th complaint - 55 reciprocal link cheaters were found and notified to this directory I PAID to join - every one of my complaints were ignored by the directory, and those link cheaters were allowed to cheat their link partners, for as long as they paid their regular premium of course to remain in the link directory.

Reciprocal Linking in Conclusion

That's class 101 on catching the ugly reciprocal link cheating webmasters.

Good luck in developing your sites PR with the sound and honest reciprocal linking, which Google adores.

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