Today I rejected a boat load of links without even looking at the site. The reason? The submitters had a list of keywords in the title or description.
The reason this is a no, no is that it looks trashy. You may have a site that covers a lot of different products or services and you may feel that to properly describe the site you need to list them all in your description, however, doing so does not help your site for SEO purposes. The description of a link is simply text on the page and will, along with the other links in that category, help aggregate a certain theme or relevance for the page. But, this will only be helpful when much of the page has similar themes, keywords, etc. One description listing everything you sell is just nonsense and serves you no purpose. What’s worse is it looks really trashy and degrades the site and your link.
To be effective with your description you should include the keyword phrase that is your title, in the description in a natural language sort of way… not a list! This particular phrase will generate “SEO Credit” being on the page in a natural way. For true optimizing, focusing links on one primary phrase is far more effective than jamming a bunch of key terms together. This is what I have found to be true in my experience an is documented throughout the Internet by other pros. Good optimization considers both search engines and human interaction for ethical, long term success.
Later…
General
directory tips, key words, rejected
Although this is a reasonable standard in the web directory business, and those who regularly submit links to directories should know, I am finding folks just submitting their links to whatever category, regardless of the relevance. For example, lately I have had dozens of SEO, Web Design and Web Hosting sites applying in “Computers” category. Seems reasonable, right? Not really… when there is a more detailed “Web Services” category with sub categories that are directly related to those businesses.
Sometimes one might choose a category that is close, but I decide there is a better one, or that I will create a new sub category to accommodate that new link. Why bother? Because, subject relevance matters to search engines and people. Some will try to submit to the TOP category and ignore the much more germane sub-category thinking that if they are on a page closer to the “top” or home page, it will do better for them. This simply is not true. Relevance and closely related topic or subject is far more important to people using the directory, and to search engines indexing it.
When editing these submissions having to go in and change the category slows down the process significantly when dealing with 30 -50 links per day. Having the wrong category selected when there was an obviously better choice is one strike against the link. If, while processing the submission, I find more problems, like bad spelling, improper capitalization, wordy description, ugly site… it gets rejected out of hand. I will often edit and update one item in the submission like the description, or the title, or the category. I really don’t like to edit all of them. So as I scan the queue I see non-capitalized titles or crappy descriptions, and the category is wrong… that site is rejected without even looking at the site itself. I have to streamline my process and let the people submit more QUALITY. That way I can get more done.
General
categories, rejected
Listen, if you want your site listed, you are better off not sending ANY reciprocal link AT ALL, than to post some garbage black-hat page that is worth nothing to my directory. This page: http://www.apartamente2camere.ro/top/ has images in place of text. And has 300 links on one page. This guy would have been better off not using a reciprocal link exchange option at all… now his site won’t get in here at all. Another hall of shame nominee.
If you want to offer a reciprocal link, I appreciate that. Just make sure its legitimate and that my link stays there indefinitely. Otherwise, don’t bother… just submit your links and wait.
General
reciprocal links, rejected
I wonder if people think directory owners/ editors are really that stupid? Maybe a little stupid, speaking for myself of course. But not THAT stupid! Today I received another bogus reciprocal link. How was it bogus, you might ask? Same as the rest; it was on some isolated link page with a million other links. It was isolated because it was not linked from any page on the main site, or anywhere else for that matter. It was built to trick people into giving the site a one-way link.
This is not just an ‘opps, oh well…’ sort of thing to over look. Its SEO fraud, and the people who do it are scum. For my part, if you try that crap with me I will simply block you from my directory altogether, so it won’t benefit you. I also have an idea to set up a few direct links to such a page so that the page will actually get crawled and those suckers who are on there will finally get credit. If page rank leakage is real, such scummy sites should get impacted by suddenly having 9000 outbound links. Hmmm, might be an idea… comments?
General
directory tips, reciprocal links, rejected
I think I was way off. To date there have been 1600 submissions and only 350 accepted links. Why? Mostly failure to confirm the email. Why do I insist on confirming email? It cuts down on automated submissions. How? If some linker submits his sites to hundreds of sites at one time using some software, the sites are often spamy. They also, don’t bother with confirming emails because either they use bogus email addresses, or they don’t have the time. These are generally unwanted spamy junk sites anyway. However, even if a linker is using an automated system, if they take the time to confirm the email, and the site and link info is good, that’s fine. But these are rare.
General
rejected
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.
General
black hat, rejected
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