Isolated Links Pages
Since I started offering reciprocal links as faster way for links to be reviewed, I have received one or two legitimate reciprocal links. All the rest have been using a deceptive practice I call “Isolated Pages”. It may be called something else, or maybe that’s what others call this practice as well… I don’t know. What I do know is that it is a deceptive practice.
How it works is simple. An offer for a reciprocal link comes to an unsuspecting webmaster. He reviews the site and the link location page for his link. It all looks fine. But wait… How can one get from the website’s main pages to the links page? The webmaster goes over several pages and finds no link to the link page. He looks at the sitemap… not there either. He looks up the site in Google to see if the links page is indexed… alas, it is not! What’s the deal here?
The deal is, the offering webmaster has created an “Isolated Page”, aka, “Island Page”. It is not connected to the rest of the site on the front end in any way. Sometimes its even blocked by the robots.txt file. Its offered up to other webmasters as a reciprocal link page, but it is completely worthless. What’s worse (or better for the trickster) is that if the link partner goes ahead and gives him the link, it actually creates a one-way link for the blackhat webmaster’s site! Pretty sneaky… huh!
That’s right, its a blackhat method. This sort of blackhat tactic is the lowest form, and makes me a little angry because, it is fooling other webmasters and website owners, not just the big bad search engines. Even some blackhats would not stoop so low, but corruption will always exist. This is why every reciprocal offer you get must be correctly reviewed. This is only one of many tricks that people use to try and get an edge. Its the same old story since the begining of recorded history. Man tends to cheat if he can get away with it. It works the same for the Internet and SEO.
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