Janric Website Design

Hear me out and possibly save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort – link building through reciprocal link exchanges is a waste of time and the idea is dead in the water. It does no good!

Take this email that I have received today (click the picture to enlarge it). It is obviously driven from some spam crawler that reservationhotels.org are using to trawl through websites and pick up email addresses.

It then adds a link to the website, along with the title taken from the home page, to a links page. Wow, so I am on links page 3005. I don’t know why but I did actually look at this page (for once). It is full of junk!

Even on just this page there are 301 redirects, Japanese character websites, German aquarist, French baby, fertility, hairdressing opportunities and loads more totally unrelated websites. Further down the page is full of other websites that can’t be found, but the crawler has still added them to the page.

But, the owners of this PR3 website are quite safe in making these junk lists of what amount to Free For All directories. Why? Well looking at the site, there is nowhere that lists to any of these links pages, so search engines will never find them. Even if they do discover 1 links page that only links to the main site, not to any of the other junk pages.

So exchanging links with these guys would be a waste of time. You would get no benefit back. What though, if they did run their link exchanging honestly and gave a link back?

Well, this page and some other randomly guessed pages all display 20 links. So the traditional Google Page Rank algorithm (as first registered, we expect it has since changed), implies that this would donate to us ((PR * 0.85) / 20). In other words, 1 20th of 85% of that page’s page rank. And that is for on topic pages.

Ignoring the spammy nature of the page, that means that we would need about 24 links like this just to get the equivalent page rank for our site. Given that it is 1 of thousands of such pages, it is never likely to rise even to PR0, so that isn’t much good.

So how many would be needed to get to PR0? It is usually a factor of about 6 per level you jump up. So around 150 links off such links pages might provide a PR0, 900 links to get a PR1 and 5,500 to get a PR2.

But, in the words of the quiz show, we don’t want to give you that much! These are off topic links from an irrelevant site. The page is not a categorised directory, merely a random assortment of Free For All links. So that effect is watered down, by how much we do not know! It could be a whole PR penalty, meaning 5,500 such rubbish links give you a PR1, or even a PR0.

So don’t waste the time it takes me to hit the delete button. I don’t bother with these links. If you want links then use a proper method of earning them on pages that have a Page Rank and are accessible to search engines.

And as for the last paragraph of the email: “If your didn’t [sic] send mail to us with your site link where placed our link in 7 days,we will remove your link!” – please do so. I have no wish to be associated with such junk methods.

Related posts:

1. Does Link Building Genuinely Work Or Are You Wasting Your Time?
2. A worthless link trade?
3. Finding The Greatest Worth Out of Paid Links
4. Some False Link Building Spam
5. Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 3, Link Building
6. Do Outbound Links Hold Search Engine Power?
7. Are Affiliate Links Damaging To Your Website – Part 3
8. Am Interesting Theory
9. Why Would Outbound Links Hold Search Engine Power?
10. Links That Are Too Cheap???