There are very different ways to manipulate search engine spidering and this will cover some of the basic checks when completing a link exchange.
<a href="http://www.intensedevelopment.net/SEO-index.html" title="The Values of a Link">Web Design & SEO resources: Link exchanges done right - The Values of a Link</a>.
An important factor when exchanging links is that the link page itself is spiderable by Search Engines, which leads to indexing. To determine the value of a link read the previously published article. If the page is not indexed, than it is invisible to Search Engines and has no way of passing a vote to your website. Sometimes you have to watch the link exchanges, since webmaster will intentially design web pages that are not linked in and provide absolutely no value to you. Two main factors to pay attention to is on the:
1. Is the web page spiderable?
2. Is the link spiderable?
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Is the web page spiderable?
To determine this you should determine if the page has been indexed in the Search Engines database. Take the full URL and enter it into Googles Search box.
Yes - If Google displays a listing with a description than the web page (not the link) seems to be valid. (Jump to C. Not indexed due to the Webmasters intervention) No - If the page is not indexed than this could be due to several reasons:
A. The web site is banned.
B. Not indexed due to being to new
C. Buried to deep within your web site
D. Not indexed due to the Webmasters intervention
A. To see if the web site is banned - It is critical not to link to banned web sites. Incoming links from other sites might not have an effect on your overall Search Engine Position, but linking out to the wrong web sites will raise a red flag and your web site might receive penalization. Banned web sites& Free For All web sites (FFA - Different, unmoderated category links, all on one page) are considered bad neighborhoods, and Google has banned the site due to intentional misuse of its <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html">Spam Policies</a> for the personal gain of higher rankings (a.k.a. Black Hat Techniques). People around the web are stating that a petty first offense gets your site banned for approximately 30 days and with each offense a 30 day increase, until you strike out (See ya, wouldn't want to be ya). To see if the site is banned use this <a href="http://www.123promotion.co.uk/tools/googlebanned.php">Google Banned Tool</a>
B. Not indexed due being New - Many times it can take a new web page up to 30 days for indexing in Google's Search Engine depending of how often Google revisits the web site. If you would like you could exchange links with this site, depending on your personal opinion of the site. If offers valuable content you could go ahead on exchange links since it mostly likely will receive a PageRank (PR) rating on Google's next update.
One thing to consider is the that the Google updates PR irregularly (We hope for it quarterly) and even though the PR toolbar is not showing any Green, does not mean that the web site does not have PR. It could be that PR just has yet to be updated in the Google toolbar. Google is notorious of providing PR updates with PR ratings that in fact where the PR statistics from a month or months prior.
C. Buried to deep within your web site - If the web page is buried too deep within the web sites, it can take a long time for the Search Engines to discover the web page, and if the web page is more than 3 clicks from the home page or linked-to-page, it can al
together prevent spidering. The size and importance of the web site in overall does play a large factor since this determines on how frequent and deep the Search Engine Spiders are willing to follow for valuable content.
A Great method of determining the link depth of your web site is to calculate the deep link ratio which is throughouly explained by Aaron Wall of <a href="http://www.seobook.com/archives/001470.shtml">SEOBook - Deep Link Ratio</a>.
D. Not indexed due to the Webmasters intervention - Here is the trickiest part. Many webmaster become Page Rank greedy and choose not to have it "Leak-out" (non-sense) to other web sites by the means of external links. There are many ways to mask the link. Here are the mostly often used ones:
robots.txt - In the Address bar type in www.thedomain.com/robots.txt. You can view an example on <a href="http://www.intensedevelopment.net/">my web design page</a>. Following the root document type in robots.txt so the that the URL tool bar looks like this <a href="http://www.intensedevelopment.net/robots.txt">http://www.intensedevelopment.net/robots.txt<;/a>. This is the universal location for the robots.txt file and if a white page comes up, ensure that the URL location of the web page you are attempting to exchange with is not getting disallowed. (e.g.: User-agent: *
Disallow: /Folder/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /File
META ROBOTS file - Check the Page Source and ensure that META name=robots tag is not disallowing indexing such as noindex or nofollow. - In Firefox you can easily check information on the web document by right click your mouse and selecting "View Page Info"
rel=nofollow - This is the newest way to prevent links from being spidered by the major Search Engines out there. Check the direct link pointing to the link page and see if it has this attribute in the anchor tag.
Redirects - Some redirect might be determined, some can't. We will review some that can:
Right click the link and select Properties. This will display the URL path. Many of these redirects are processed on the server side and are unfortunately masked and cannot be determined.
JavaScript
Rumors are that some Search Engines are able to follow a JavaScript link and has become increasingly less effective. To check if their links are "clean", mouseover their links and look at the URL in the status bar at the bottom of your web browser. If the status bar shows the URL like redirect.cgi?id=2, then it is not considered a clean link. But what if the mouseover gives you a description rather than a URL? In this case, when you mouseover the link, click on the link without releasing the mouse button. It will display the URL.
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Is the link spiderable
To determine if a link exchange is spiderable can be a daunting task and quite impossible due to server side programming. We will review some of the basic methods which should eliminate some of the bad link exchanges.
On the web page, open the source code and find your link text within the document. Ensure that anchor attribute does not have the rel="nofollow" which will in fact not be spiderable by Google. Other Search Engines such as Yahoo and MSN have stated that the will be supporting this attribute and as of 03/2005, have not yet publicily confirmed that these links in fact will not be spidered.
1. The page has no PageRank
IF PageRank (PR) is not passed to your web page, than this result in not receiving any boost in the Search Engine Result Positioning (SERP's), meaning no vote was casted to yo
ur web site and no PR was passed on. The only benefit you will get is by obtaining the ability of receiving click-through traffic. Taking these factors into consideration, you are only receiving 1 out of 3 benefits of the link exchange which overall does not make this link exchange to appealing.
2. The page has PageRank
If the web page has PageRank then you are on the right track on getting a link exchange that might be beneficially to your needs. However even though this is true there still are ways to manipulate the PR to not follow external links.
Ways of determining if the link exchange is worth it.
a. robots.txt
b. JavaScript
c. Redirection
d. rel=nofollow
robots.txt
Check the robots.txt. The robots.txt will always be lowercase and always at the root of the web sites such as: http://www.website.com/robots.txt
- In Firefox you can easily check information on the web document by right click your mouse and selecting "View Page Info"
PageRank value - Ensure that the web page does not have a huge quantity of links, since this page might have become devalued and the benefits of sharing PageRank with all the other external links, just might not be worth it. Each web page has its on amount of voting points that it is allowed to distribute. Lets say a web document receives 100 points. These points are evenly distributed between all outgoing links. The more links, the less points your outgoing link receives.
Mr. Green is the owner of a <a href="http://www.intensedevelopment.net/">Web Design</a> company based out of Tampa Florida, offering affordable web marketing solutions.
