One of my PR5 hobby pages shows up as #1 in the SERPS for a keyword, and it brings in a few dollars from Adsense and more than a few from Chitika. A possible future competitor has asked me to post a link to his new site. Is there a way to give him the link without it boosting his position in the SERPS?
And very unfair to him. It would be better to just say no to a link exchange than to be deceptive in my view. Carol
Why is it deceptive? If the person asked for the link to get visitors, then it will still accomplish that. If he did it to get serps, who was being deceptive?
If the link is on a special page, you can use meta tags to tell robots not to follow links on a page. You can use your robots.txt file to have that page not indexed. You could also start a directory on your site and have all the links redirected.
While most people look for sites that their visitors would get something out of and find interesting, since links are important in how you rank I was assuming the exchange was for both visitors and serps and assuming that is how most people view it. Therefore, the person requesting the link exchange would not be deceptive as he would assume you both were exchanging for serps and visitors. I get visitors from exchanging links but it is a lot of time and work for the amount of visitors one gets in comparison to what one gets from good serps. So, am I wrong in what I understand about exchanging links being for both and that it isn't to be done to get good serps? Carol
Good discussion. The email request I received was not for a link exchange, but rather for a link to his new page from my existing page. There was no mention of reciprocity. The email seemed sincere. Since his new page has no Adsense (yet), for all I know he is just a brand-new webmaster trying to get some visitors. Giving him a human-friendly link with "nofollow" will accomplish that.
With one of my sites I take on advertisers, some potential compeditors advertise and I nofollow their ads (I nofollow all ads). Because they are paying for ads, not seo links. In my books ads are ads and if someone wants to pay for links of seo benefit that would cost lots more (given my site is the authority site in this case).
how can I see if people do this when I buy links from them? One of the major reasons I have been buying links is to increase PR. Is there a way of checking they are not doing this with their existing links before I part with any cash? I will be if I find I've been wasting my money!!! Out of interest Dominic, do you make this clear to them when they buy links ?
Steve, you can go to the site, right click on the page and view the source. Find your link and see if it has the nofollow attribute in the link. I can see the point of not passing PR with an ad, you are agreeing to let them advertise you are not necessarily endorsing their site. I use Google adsense, I'm allowing people to advertise on my site, I'm not going to check each one first to be sure that I think their site is worth being linked to. On the other hand if I am exchanging a link, I am telling people that come to my site that I think this other site might be useful, passing PR is like voting for the site.