How Link Exchange Partners Cheat You

It is not just you, these things happen to everyone. Worrying only leads to more problems.

You need to relax, it is a great method to get ideas, inspirations and solutions. The other thing is that making link exchanges is not an easy task, but time consuming if you do not invest some money in some software.

The other important thing is to take things more easy. What that means is you should not complain or waste a lot of time discussing why this or why that. Time is precious. These are common things that every webmasters faces. Once you know this you should feel a bit better.

The nofollow tag.

Some webmasters use the nofollow tag either on your link, or on their links page. You need to make sure that spiders can reach the page your link is on. Sometimes webmasters put the nofollow tag on the link pointing to their linkspage, which is located on the homepage. There are plugins that highlight links that are using nofollow tags or find out some other tools if you do not wish to check this manually.

The robots file.

Robots files are used sometimes instead of the nofollow tags to block spiders from indexing the linkspage. You need to check this file, which is called robots.txt and located in the root of the website. Make sure spiders are allowed to visit the linkspage.

The meta tag.

You need to check the meta tags of the homepage and also the meta tags of the page your link is on. In both tags, you need to make sure they are not blocking the spiders in some way or another. The attributes that you need to look for are all, index, follow. That means spiders should follow all links and index them all.

They remove your link.

If your link partner removes your link from their website, rest assured not all of your partners will notify you. As long as they are not using some script that does it automatically you will have to check this out for yourself. There are scripts and software to do this easily. So keep record somewhere always of the location your partner placed your link so you check every one or two months.

This happens for several reasons. Sometimes webmasters do it because they cannot find a link back and most common reason is because you moved their link. So like my first suggestion never waste time complaining and moaning about this. Simple email them and let them know you are going to remove their link because you cannot find yours. Give them an option to re submit their link.

For example, tell them you can reply to this email if you are still interested in a link exchange. Then if after a couple of days they do not reply, send them another email and then after another couple of days remove their link if they do not reply.

They are not linking to the linkspage from anywhere.

That is another problem. Usually if they are not linking to their linkspage from their homepage you can easily tell. The linkspage will have no menus, just a blank page with links. Most webmasters who do this simple do not know they have to link to their linkspage from their homepage. They are new to seo.

So check if they are linking to it from the homepage only if the linkspage has absolutely nothing but links. To make sure then google the page and see if it is in the index, if it is then obviously it is linked from somewhere.

Keep those in mind when you are doing link exchanges, find some plugins or software to help you do things faster. But always treat your link partners they way you want them to treat you. Remember they are helping you improve search engine rankings.

By: Karl Sultana