Checking the Validity of Link Exchanges

You have heard of some webmasters who will exchange links with you, but then will not give you the proper credit for your links in the search engines. There are several ways you can check to make sure your link will help your search engine rankings.

View the robots.txt file
Go to the main directory and request the robots.txt file. You can do this by typing www.example.com/robots.txt. Check to see that the webmaster hasn't disallowed robots from the page or directory that the link exchanges are kept in. If the link exchange was in the /links/ directory, and you see this in the robots.txt:

You would NOT get credit for that link in the search engines.

Likewise, if you link was on the exchanges.html page, and you see this in the robots.txt:

You would NOT get credit for that link in the search engines

Check the meta tags on the page
Webmasters can also prevent search engines from following or indexing pages and links on specific pages by adding a specific meta tag to each page.

You would not get credit for a link on this page.

Hoplinks or Jumplinks
If you click on your link, and you see something like www.example.com/url/linkid342 before it continues to your site, this would mean that the link is routed through an internal site link before it goes to your site. Some webmasters do get credit for these links.

Do keep in mind that there are perfectly legitimate uses for these kinds of links. Some sites will use them to track advertising, while directories use them to gauge a site's popularity. But do be aware that you may or may not get backlink and PageRank benefits for the link.

Javascript Links
Webmasters can also hide links within javascript, which will not be credited through. It will often seem to be just like a normal link. You mouseover it, and you see the URL in the status bar. But a look at the source code will reveal your URL is actually imbedded in <javascript> tags. While some search engines have begun to follow these kinds of links, you will not get any benefits from the search engines at this time.

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