The Word Count Tool that was previously hosted on Zann Marketing has now moved to its own domain. (Read more…)

Comprehensive link exchange information is available through our new site dedicated to the education of link developers, webmasters and site owners about link exchanges, link exchange practices and ways to get links to your site. (Read more…)

Link exchanges are a great way to boost the number of visitors to your web site. They also play a role in increasing link popularity and the chances of your web site being found in search engines.

Establishing a link exchange isn’t difficult, however, maintaining them takes more time and dedication. You may find that some webmasters suddenly, and often without warning or notice, remove your link from their site. This practice by some webmasters make checking reciprocal links an important task for any one involved in link exchanges. (Read more…)

It’s becoming more well known among webmasters that links are important if you want your web site to be found. Some webmasters and search engine optimizers will buy links to increase their link popularity and chances of being found on search engines. Another method of getting links to your web site is by link exchanges.

A link exchange is an agreement between two webmasters of two web sites. They agree to place a link to the other’s web site, usually in a links directory or links page. Exchanging links in such a way can increase the web site’s chances of being found on search engines and it also provides a resource for visitors of a web site who are looking for similar sites to browse.

With increasing numbers of webmasters aware of search engine optimization and link exchanges, many of these webmasters have started to use “black-hat” search engine optimization techniques as outlined in the page, The Shady Side of Link Exchanges.

So what does constitutes as a “good” web site to exchange links with? (Read more…)

The things some webmasters do for link exchanges never cease to amaze me. This page lists, in brief, some of the shady practices I’ve witnessed while processing link exchange requests.

1. Using robots meta tags to instruct search engine spiders not to index and or follow links on the links pages or directories.
2. Using robots.txt to instruct search engine spiders not to visit the links directory or pages.
3. Using the attribute rel=”nofollow” to let search engine spiders know not to attribute link popularity to the resulting page of the link.
4. Using javascript to hide links from search engine spiders.
5. Using tracking URLs and redirected URLs.
6. Using orphaned links pages / directories (link pages and directories not linked to).
7. Using frames or iframes so the page which actually contains your link doesn’t have much link popularity, or even worse, is orphaned.
8. Using other people’s / other site’s links page as the reciprocal links page (pretending to be a triangular link exchange).
9. Asking for link exchanges with multiple sites (pretending to ask for triangular link exchanges), but only giving one link. For example, they have 3 sites, A, B and C. Their site A links to your site D, and then they ask for link exchange between D and A, D and B, and D and C, stating that the reciprocal link is from site A. That way you give them 3 links and they give you 1 link in return.

I’m always open and willing to consider any and all link exchange requests, but these practices simply wastes webmaster’s time and patience.

More details of these shady link exchange practices can be found here.