Hello, After a few months back they had an ugly story when a guy posted here on DP that iWebtool stole a few of his articles http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=530504&highlight=iwebtool it seems these guys did it again. I was chating with a good friend and he told me iwebtool submited their site to his reciprocal directory last year (23 August) so he got a free link from them. He was pretty unhappy that the link never helped his site and made a quick research... Well it seems that iwebtool placed his link on the page below http://www.iwebtool.com/links.html which it doesn't seems to be indexed or cached. More than that I wasn't able to find any link to this page from their website which means they keep it pretty well hidden It is a pitty that iwebtool which I always considered a good resource uses these kind of techniques to fool people and to get some free backlinks. What do you think?
They've also got it blocked from search engines in their robots.txt file: http://www.iwebtool.com/robots.txt Not a completely uncommon SEO technique. Get incoming links. Give outgoing links. Don't let the search engines see your outgoing links. Gives you a better incoming-outgoing ratio.
I think that makes a good example of why reciprocal listings are useless. When a large company like iwebtool places you on their uncached farm it prooves how useless it is.
I don't think they're completely useless. I have sites in which link trading is the only form of SEO (other than on-page SEO) and after about a year now, they are on page #1 in Google for some pretty broad terms (used for anchor text). I would agree that it's dishonest though. Most webmasters don't check for things like nofollow or robots.txt when trading links.
They aren't a large company they are a couple of clever lads from England making some bucks like the rest of us. They do a great job of looking like a large company though.
Perhaps because this page is over 1 year old and iwebtool have upgraded their services to something better? The reason why it isn't linked is perhaps because this is old data which just happens to be left on their host. The robots.txt is for protection which again maybe added when that service was discontinued.