We have received information from a pretty trusted
source that Link Exchanges are something that some of the search engines
frown on and are penalizing for using them.
Here is what the search engines are formally stating:
- "...participation in certain services to
artificially inflate
link popularity.."
- "...participating in services where you agree to
add a list of links page on your site. Other participants in the link
exchange service agree to do the same, thereby improving everyone's link
popularity..."
- ".. we pay attention to products that automate
link management, check site ranking, cloak, generate automatic doorways,
etc. And people who abuse those tools may run afoul of scoring in the
just same way as people who do unethical things by hand.. "
(The first 2 quotes are from Market
Position Monthly, Feb. 2001)
What's springing up around the Internet are these Free-for-All type link
exchanges. You put your link in a page that everyone is supposed to copy
and update once a month, to a page on your website. So you have 400 links
on a page, all jumbled up, no ordered organization, total link chaos and
this is attached to your website with your domain name embedded into the
url address for all to see. This is supposed to look like everyone
included has links pointing to and from them and then the search engines
are going to just love this, thus sending the webmaster the traffic they
so desperately need to survive.
Now along comes the search engine robots, which are the most sophisticated
machines ever known to man, infused with millions of dollars of
development money, pretty much all-knowing of every keyword on the
Internet and the pages to which they belong, running on banks of super
computers, sitting at the apex of gigabytes of storage. Besides just link
popularity, these machines do co relational calculations, linking Themes
or subjects together. It knows the keywords belonging to each website and
has the ability to do statistical correlation which is common in most
languages used to create these programs. A quick query to it's database
and it comes up with a score of how closely you are in Theme-tightness to
the sites you are linking to and perhaps even how tightly-themed those
sites you are linked to, are to the ones linked to on their websites. The
more tightly-themed you score means you are only including websites in
your link pages that match or have something to do with the Themes of your
website.
What we have here in the case of free-for-all link pages is total link
chaos. No organization to it at all. Of course these sites using these
methods will be punished. I'm sure that since Zeus already has the program
code to recognize these websites, these search engine robot programmers,
who know what they are doing :-), have programmed their search engine
robots with something similar also.
When Zeus finds the text patterns matching these known link cancers or
free-for-all link pages, he immediately backs out of the site, marking it
visited and NOT a Theme Site no matter what the site has to offer, then
goes on to the next site. Thus completely ignoring it. It doesn't exist.
I feel very strongly against webmasters creating these types of link
pages, ruining the very organizational fabric of the Internet, in their
ignorance in believing numbers win out over quality or to the appeal of
the easy way out. Those sites with these known text pattern matches will
never be included in a Zeus-generated Link Directory.
Now think how these same smart search engine robots think when they
stumble across a Zeus-generated Link Directory. The thousands of links
listed in Zeus directories are websites that match each other in Themes
without the threads of the cancerous growth of link disorder infringing
into it. The difference is like night and day, organization over disarray.
Thousands of links, all nicely organized on hundreds of keyword-tuned
pages. Resonant Keyword patterns throughout each page, using the embedded
keywords you selected as your Themes. These are used in the meta tags,
titles, text, and most importantly, the page's URL address. Add to each
page the hundreds of listings which include those same keywords again and
again in each Theme Site's URL address, title, description and comment and
perhaps banner image URL address. These are very good pages to find for a
search engine robot.
Order against chaos
No Zeus user has reported any decrease of traffic from the search engines.
Zeus-generated link directory pages are not artificially inflating link
popularity. We are increasing link popularity properly. Those of us who
use Zeus, without abuse, should have no problems whatsoever, as we bring
order to chaos.
The problem, as I see it, is that uninformed webmasters will start shying
away from links of any kind. Can you imagine the Internet without links?
All because of misinformation. It would be the end of the Internet as we
know it today. If we don't inform the public on how to properly obtain and
use Reciprocal Links and the dangers of using these Links-for-All pages,
every webmaster on the net will pay for it. Please email your webmaster
friends, post this to the marketing boards, add it to your website. Let's
take care of this before panic sets in.
To view the results of an active Zeus Robot,
click here.
This article has been reprinted with
permission of the author. To visit the site:
www.cyber-robotics.com © David Notestine, all rights remain
with author.
