Hi, I make a habit out of studying the backlinks of the top 10 sites for my target keywords. One of these sites was using the Linksmaster.com service to automate their link exchanges. As is typical with this setup, a separate Links/Partners/Resources page is assigned to contain these links. Well, what I noticed is that there were thousands of backlinks and many site-wide links to this top 10 site using the targetted anchor keywords explaining their high ranking. However, that same site did not seem to reciprocate and had no Links/Partners/Resources page in return. o Did they employ some kind of three-way link setup to accomplish this? o I have unused domains I've registered. Could these sites be used to with the purpose of containing outgoing links for linksmaster partners and, in return, I'd have the backlinks pointing to my site I want to get ranked well for? o LinksMaster charges $20 per month to maintain and automate the links? Seems like a permanent bill because once you stop paying, you lose all the backlinks. Is it worth the expense and is there a better link management service? Appreciate Any Advice George
Yes. One word - link farm. Keep it on the long and straight white hat road and you'll kick their asses one day or another. Scan your competitors sites for outgoing links (dead-links.com does it well) - you'll notice a pattern soon. This is commonly known as a link farm. One you're stuck in it, it's not a good place to be in. Concentrate in gaining 'natural' looking links. Automated reciprocal/3-way links are not the way to go.
These are called link farms. There are many of them, and now there is a latest breed of them which deals with a niche. But they are not very good for building link popularity. Specially FFA, Free for all link farms are of not good at all. Avoid them. Instead of looking at these top ten sites, try to have some geninue backlinks and traffic to your site.
Hi, Both of your points are very well taken and thanks for the reply. If you look at it from a results perspective, this site is and has been in the top 10 so you can't neglect that this link strategy got them and is keeping them there. Is this something Google will eventually catch on to or can they keep getting away with it? Thanks George
Search engines are smart and do not approve of FFA site. Avoid them! Do it right and you will see better results. It does take time, but it is worth it.
It's possible their reciprocal link page is buried and not indexed because of robots.txt or other methods used to prevent indexing. There's quite a few of these shady operators doing this...