Beware of Dishonest Link Exchangers

Maybe I have not been observant or just getting too old for this business for as long as I have been in it. In either case the following incident was very new for me even though I am aware of various scams using the Internet. I also think you should be aware of these practices as well, then you could decide to join them if it doesn’t ruffle up your feathers or go against it if it does.

Recently I received a “link exchange” request email from a Webmaster. It was well written and looked flawless! I almost agreed to the exchange but I noticed, almost by accident, the link URL, where the link to me was setup, and the link URL, where he wanted me to use for his link were different. That grabbed my curiosity’s leg so I clicked on the URL where my link was and sure enough there it was, nice and pretty as you please with a whole lot of other links, not unusual. However, other pages on the site went no-where. They were blank except for the page that held all the links. Next I clicked on the URL that he wanted me to use for him and voila, his website came up with a page ranking of 5! Then I wondered if I could get to the links page from the index page of the actual website. Try and try I did without any success. There was nowhere any mention of any links page, partners page, link exchange page, nothing, zilch. I was puzzled for about 5 minutes as to what he was trying to do then his intent dawned on me. Needless to say I promptly informed the Webmaster that if he wanted to link exchange with me, he had to list my link on a page accessible from the website. I never had a response back!

Subsequent to that email I got other ones in the days to follow from different Webmasters pretty much with similar content but not exactly, requesting link exchange. It is obvious they are trying to created one way links by having me link to their website while they send me off to some obscure page in a directory on the server not accessible from the website. The amazing thing is that their links page was loaded with various links, evidently a lot of Webmasters had fallen victim to this scheme.

We all need to beware of practices such as this that is not equitable for both parties or takes unfair advantage of one’s good intentions to honestly go about the business of improving their page and/or SE rankings. I am amazed this is actually practiced and I am not sure that Search Engines know what’s going on but they will and hopefully put little value on the effort.That’s why a service such as the one Design Firm is offering to Webmasters is so valuable. It is an honest link exchange where both parties could benefit.