Link Chicanery

Over the past few weeks I’ve been hunting for links for myself and for clients. While I know that this subject has been beaten into the ground, resurrected and beaten into the ground once again with the frequency of rabbit copulation, I’ve come across a few things to look for and look out for that were new to me.

Many sites approach linking with robots; they automate mass emails to plead for them, and they check for reciprocal link requests with a similar script. There are many ways to make your link partner think they are getting the link love returned to them, and very few bots will check for this nastiness.

Links that are in Javascript, images, or redirected through third party sites will not help you in your endeavors. Another way that is frequently used and seldom detected is simply blocking a link page in a robots.txt file. All of these methods can be used to help you gain links in a shady way or for people to gain links from you in a shady way.

Firefox offers a great tool to point out any links that use rel="nofollow" on their page. You can download the helpful toolbar with this and other functions at http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/.

Other tools that I have recently come across are:

• TouchGraph Google Browser gives you a visual layout of who is linking to a site by term. http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
  
• http://linktree.info/ looks at multiple sites for a term and locates common backlinks.
  
• http://soloseo.com/tools/linksearch.html gives you multiple search commands for finding links on your own.
  
• A list of general directory submission sites can be found at http://strongestlinks.com/directories.php
  
• A list of niche directories can be found at http://www.web-directories.ws/Niche/
  
• http://www.arcanaweb.com/resources/article-directories.html offers a great resource for niche and general article submissions
  
• langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html helps you find authoritative links by comparing search results in Google and Yahoo!, and how they are ranking in each.