Are your link exchange partners playing games with you?

Recently, while setting up a link exchange with another webmaster, I noticed that he was trying to create a "false" link to my page. While the link still works for human surfers, it wouldn't for search engine spiders. Spiders would not be able to see the link to my site, which obviously hurts me, while the spiders would interpret the link on my site to his as one-way, benefitting him. Needless to say, I yanked his link from my site and do not plan on any future interaction.

Here are three tips to determine if you are getting ripped off in a link exchange or not:
1 - Check their link code for a 'rel="nofollow"' tag. The nofollow tag basically tells spiders to not follow the link or count it in any page ranking algorithms. Whether all spiders obey this tag or not is a different story, but there is no reason why someone would include this tag in a link exchange unless they were trying to deceive you. An example of the nofollow tag in action would look like this:

<a href="http://www.google.com" rel="nofollow">Google Link</a>


2 - Check their link destination for PHP redirects. There is a good deal of debate as to whether spiders can follow PHP redirects or not, but its probably a good idea to assume the latter. PHP redirects would look something like this:

<a href="http://www.theirsite.com/link.php?id=141">Your Site</a>

Some webmasters say they use these type of link schemes to monitor outbound traffic - which may be honestly true. However, there are other (and better) methods that they could use to monitor outbound traffic instead.

3 - Check the language the link is encoded in. If its not a standard HTML link, chances are spiders won't be able to read it. Of the common web languages, spiders cannot see Javascript or Flash links, so any link encoded with either of those technologies is basically useless to spiders.


The bottom line : insist on good old <a href="http://www.yoursite.com"> links whenever possible. All webmasters are capable of doing it - they may just need some convincing.