Hello all. This is my second post here at DP, and I hope my contribution is valueable. Ok, I've been referred to Bruce Clay's website a couple of times. You can find it here http://www.bruceclay.com/ But I've always been more of a Matt Cutt's fan myself. Anyway, I think the information from Mr. Clay is pretty cool, but pretty much what anyone can pick up from asking the right questions, or doing the right search, here at this, or any forum that has responsible and knowledgable posters. However, there was somehting pretty new to me there, and I intrigued at the logic behind it. Mr. Clay runs a service called LinkMap(TM) where basically, he lists the web pages that link to your website. Not a link directory, mind you, but a list of the web PAGES that link to your site. The thought behind it is pretty simple. When the SE's crawl your site, they come upon these links that point to your site, crawl THOSE, and viola, you've told the SE's all of your IBL's. Now, a couple of things that drive me a bit batty about this. I can understand the benefit of not letting the SE's find the links themselves, but telling them where those links are. You don't have to wait for them to eventually get to them. However, you are also actively promototing the other links on those websites. Not just your business, but probably your competitors businesses as well. However, my biggest concern is this. Would the SE's consider this spamming? Or Black Hat techniques? I mean, a lot of us use a sitemap on our sites, to some degree of success. Some of us in the e-commerce field us all-products pages, where the SE's can see all of our products, and that helps a little too. But this IBL's page is a little different. It kinda makes sense, but at the same time, I'm scared to try it. Definetly Google has a new set of rules and parameters in their alg that is making spamming tougher, but spammers are a crafty bunch, and change their tactics to work withing Google. But I'm not a spammer, and have no intention of using black hat techniques. Don't get me wrong, I'm not more honest or ethical than any one else, and we all have our tricks and methods for gettting on the SE's. But I try to stay withing the bounds of my page MUST work for my users, as well as for google. Ok, so, the IBL's Link Page, do you think it is worth a try? If they do work, would they work from within your site? or Should it be pages that are hosted at a different site? And the best question of all What are you crazy? Don't go even near that thing! Your comments.
I posted this thread back in March. No takers. I guess nobody had an opinion. But I'm still curious. What do you think?
I don't think it's a necessarily bad idea, but I don't think it's a great one either. Yes, you do want the other sites and pages that link to you to be indexed. No, you don't want to link to a bunch of junk from your site. Not all of the IBLs to my site are good ones. I've come accross some strange ones - either through referrer spam, or other areas that I just would never link to - for instance an anti-baby site linked to my ultrasound website. I certainly wouldn't want to link back to them (and I'm appalled that there actually is such a site out there). With a quality control system in place, it's a pretty good idea. Without one, not so great. What about sitewides? You certainly don't want to have a sitemap of an entire site up on your site. I would scale back to include only highly relevant links from pages within quality sites that are not currently included in the index of one of the top 3 SEs. And at the same time, it wouldn't be a bad idea to contact other similarly linked sites to do the same and ping them for a link exchange relationship while you are at it. Before doing so, it would make sense to monitor the pages you potentially want to link to and the sites in general just to make sure you are not producing outbound links to anything that might be considered a bad neighborhood.
This Link Map technique must just work out if you can put it up on some place other than your site itself and then try to get the robots in. Just to be safe. IT