Links to avoid

Hey everyone.

We’re in the process of creating a crawler to check our back links on our link partner sites. So far, these are the kind of links we know to avoid:

• Links that are written with Javascript or use Javascript to jump to the page
• Links with nofollow or links that are hidden (using display:none)
• Pages that color links the same as the background
• Headers embedded inside a link
• Font tags inside the anchor text
• Anything unwanted inside the anchor text (ie: hyphens, numbers)
• If the link is a CGI jump
• Using a dropdown list for links

Anything else to add to this list? examples would be helpfull.

 

i think some webmasters use the javascript code in link to track the clicks, make it as optional to use or not to use..

 

Here's a couple: Meta tags on the page telling teh crawlers not to follow the links. Robots.txt for the domain, denying access to the page where the links are.

 

- thanks - added. we usually only trade links with static url's so that would not be a problem for us. But a good point.

- thanks - added. A very good point one I overlooked.

please keep them rolling and examples would be helpful...

 

- We are also thinking of creating a firefox plug in where the same url qualifications can be read while browsing a site...

 

If they use javascript to track clicks but it's still a regular a href tag, there's no problems with the SEs.

 

- thanks exam

 

I've come across webmasters who have links pages that check out, SEO-wise, but the link from the homepage to the links page has a nofollow tag, so all the links are effectively useless. Though I don't know how difficult this check would be to implement in a spider.

 

For what roseplant says, just check Google (using the API) and see if the page is cached.

 

just a simple code error...

 

sGroup, it appears that your primary concern is PR. Based on the caveats in your original post you seem to be mainly worried about PR passing to your pages. That's all very well.... but I'd also worry about other things.

This post of mine covers some of the things I look for in links. It's a bit overboard for most people ... but it may give you some ideas.

 

thanks... For some sites we care about the PR passing and for other we don't....

 

Just remember that qualtiy, relevant links can also bring targeted traffic to your site and shouldn't only be for PR purposes. So, even if they are not se friendly as far as PR goes, you may want to consider keeping the link anyway. Some of my reciprocal links are on not so se friendly pages, but they bring me nice traffic so I am happy for the exchange. You should remember is not always about PR.

 

PR is overrated, especially after the recent update. If anything, just think of PR as a basic guidline to the general quality of a page. Boosting your site's PR should not be your goal. Your goal should be driving traffic and boosting your search engine rankings. PR comes after that, not before. Having a great PR means absolutely nothing overall, especially after the latest Google PR update where new and mostly crappy blogs managed to become PR5's.

If you are building links, just get links that you know will bring actual traffic. Then you get the benefit of real traffic from the link and later traffic from the search engine.

 

With cgi jumps or any other server-side redirect, do the bots think that the redirect link is the url of the page that it redirects to and therefore don't count it as a backlink?
I've been trying to figure out why redirect links don't help with linkbuilding in terms of pr and ranking - thanks.

 

As I understand it, redirects will help you out, but you need to do a 301 or 302 redirect and not some freeking meta refresh or javascript redirect.

 

I also avoid php redirect links. I haven't seen them indexed in google. but that's just me