I own several education related sites and over the last 3 months I've noticed something new and annoying--I keep getting link exchange offers from people who want me to put a link up to one of their sites (a quality site it seems) but the catch is is that they offer to put my link up on a few websites that are clearly 'not real'. By 'not real' i mean these sites pruport to be an education based site but if you actually read the pages and look around at the site, you see that really the sites are just spam link farms that, at first glance, appear to be legitamte. Take a look at the following sites to see what I mean http://tinyurl.com/dhbdbm or at http://tinyurl.com/dguejr These are just 2 of the examples. The funny thing i is that different people have contacted me offering me the same exact links on some of these sites...of course, they want good links from my legit sites. Any comments on this? Personally, at first, I was inclined to think 'heck, a link is a link is a link and i'll take whatever i can get'....but after a few moments consideration, i decided that these sites' links are worthless--the domains will never get any traffic and eventually might be flagged as link farms. any thoughts?
yeh stay away from link farms and bad neighbourhood sites and pages. Only link to and get links from sites that have some quality
thanks for the response jenny1985. the interesting thing that these scammers seem to have done...and i don't know if i made it clear in my original post is the following 1) they are promoting legitimate sites (i didn't provide the url to their real sites) and they want links to these very legit sites 2) but they only offer links from these link farms in essence, they want valid links to valid sites but they only offer invalid links in return. interestingly enough, there seem to be some well respected educational sites that have engaged in these exchanges. if you look at the sites that have done these exchanges (i'll assume that any link to some othersite(dot)com means that someothersite(dot)com ) you'll see some sites that are quite well known (in the edu world at least) just when you think you've seen it all!
hmm could you send me a PM with the sites? be interested to see whats going on here. Be wary of whos linking to you, can cause lots of problems