Hey guy's, I was just thinking of making a site where I find the best sites in a niche write a piece about what you can find at that site and add a link to it. In essence a link site for all the best site's in my niche. Is there a problem with linking to a site? Do I need to ask permission of the site creator before I make a link on my site?
Maybe .0005% of webmasters will object. There is nothing illegal about it. Copying their content and trying justify it with a link may get you into trouble. And IMO you would be in the wrong here. Now if you turn your site into a spammy "post for sale" site some webmasters may ask you to remove their links. All you would need to do is comply. Best wishes.
Many webmasters would've love a link back to their sites, especially if, as you claimed, you will put some sort of info-guide or review or description for each site you link to. Just don't do what most splogs do, which is, to copy parts of an article (mostly the first paragraph) of a particular site and link the site via the title of the article. This type of sites, the RSS aggregator ones, don't have much value in the eyes of Google. In fact, they are considered as trash sites.
I have to say, yes, since the purpose to why you are linking to them is because you say something about them. You may call it 'citing references' just like in a research paper. Correct me if I am wrong, but there is no existing law yet that regulates the 'linking to,' and I don't think there would ever be one since linking to a certain site doesn't do any harm on the site being linked to. Many of us even pay for one way link, don't we?
Linking to a webpage is perfectly legal if the descriptor you have around it is your own writting. There have been a few cases where people were sued for deep-linking (linking to a non-front page of a site), but the defendant usually wins those cases.