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Top Dirty Linking Tricks
By Lee Roberts (c) 2006, Rose Rock Design, Inc.
http://www.roserockdesign.com

Part of achieving top search engine positions is through links
from other Web pages. These links can come from people who like
your site (natural links), reciprocal linking, directory
submissions and a few other ways.

The goal of trading links is to get quality links for quality
links. True quality links will carry benefits far beyond that of
attaining a coveted position in the search engine results. The
links will bring traffic from the Web page linking to your Web
page. Therefore, you want to ensure you trade or barter links
from quality partners.

Sometimes it's hard to determine who is a quality linking
partner, even for the expert. So, how can you tell if your
link is on a Web page where its value will not be very good?

The short list below highlights ways of diminishing or
nullifying the value of a link to your site from another
Web page.

Meta Tag Masking - this old trick simply used CGI codes to hide
the Meta tags from browsers while allowing search engines to
actually see the Meta tags.

Robots Meta Instructions - using noindex and nofollow attributes
let's the novice link partner see the visible page with their
link while telling the search engines to ignore the page and the
links found on the page. Nofollow can be used while allowing the
page to be indexed which gives the impression that the search
engines will eventually count the link.

Rel=nofollow Attributes - this is not a real attribute based upon
HTML standards, but rather it is an attribute approved by the
search engines to help identify which links should not be
followed. This attribute is often used with blogs to prevent
comment and link spam. The link will appear on the Web page and
in the search engine's cache, but never be counted.

Dynamic Listing - dynamic listing is a result of having links
appear randomly across a series of pages. Each time the link is
found on a new page, the search engines count consider the
freshness of the link. It is extremely possible that the link
won't be on the same page upon the next search engine visitation.
So, the link from a partner displaying rotating, dynamic link
listings rarely helps.

Floating List - this can be easily missed when checking link
partners. Essentially, your link could be number one today, but
as new link partners are added your link is moved down the list.
This is harmful because the values of the links near the bottom
of the list are considered to be of lesser value than the links
at the top. With the floating list, it is possible to have your
link moved to a new page whose PR value is significantly less or
non-existent and the new page may not be visited and indexed for
months.

Old Cache - the caching date provided by Google indicates the
last time the page was cached. Pages with lower PR values tend
to be visited and cached less often than pages that have medium
to high PR values. If the cache is more than six months old, it
can be surmised that Google has little or no desire to revisit
the page.

Denver Pages - while Denver, CO is a nice place to visit, Denver
Pages are not a place you want to find your link in a trade.
Denver Pages typically have a large amount of links grouped into
categories on the same page. Some people call this the mile high
list. These types of pages do not have any true value in the
search engines and are not topically matched to your site.

Muddy Water Pages - these are dangerous and easy to spot. Your
link will be piled in with non-topically matched links with no
sense of order. It's like someone took all the links and threw
them in the air to see where they land. These are worse than the
Denver Pages.

Cloaking - cloaking is the process of providing a page to people
while providing a different page to search engines. You could be
seeing your link on the Web page, but the search engines could
possibly never see the link because they are provided with a
different copy. Checking Google's cache is the only way to catch
this ploy.

Dancing Robots - this can be easily performed with server-side
scripting like PHP and is rarely easy to catch. In this
situation people that attempt to view the robots.txt file receive
a copy of the robots.txt file that does not include exclusion
instructions for the search engines. However, when the search
engines request the robots.txt file they receive the exclusion
instructions. With this situation the links pages will never be
linked and you'll never know why without expert assistance.

Meta Tags and Robots.txt Confusion - which instructions have the
most weight? Don't know the answer? Shame. Search engines do.
If they conflict, the page Meta tags are typically considered the
rule to follow.

Link the Head - while these links do not count in the search
engines and do not show up on the Web page, they do get counted
by scripts or programs designed to verify the links exist. These
programs only look for the URL within the source codes for the
Web page.

Empty Anchors - this is a nasty trick, but can be an honest
mistake. The links exist and are counted by the search engines,
but unfortunately are neither visible nor clickable on the Web
page. So, there are no traffic values from the link.

The goal of trading links is to trade them for equal value.
Understanding the ways people will attempt to prevent passing a
quality value from their Web page to your Web page can help you
avoid these useless links. If your link partner pulls under-
handed tricks the links they trade you are useless.

While you may never be an expert in knowing all the latest
tricks, traps and tests, you can now become an expert in knowing
the thirteen mentioned above. Ensuring your link partners are not
following or using these tactics can help improve the quality of
links you gain from other Web pages. By having quality links
pointing to your Web page you will gain additional traffic
through organic search engine results and visitors driven
directly from your linking partners.
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Lee Roberts, The Web Doctor®, is President/Founder of Rose Rock
Design, Inc. (http://www.roserockdesign.com) a website design
company (http://www.roserockdesign.com) and Founder of the Apple
Pie Shopping Cart (http://www.applepiecart.com), an ecommerce
shopping cart (http://www.applepiecart.com).
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