Why redirects are bad:You should be careful when exchanging links, or adding your site to directories. Not all links are created equal, and some can have a negative impact on your websites search engine placement. Some websites (including some directories) use a redirect script to send visitors to your website. Why should you care? Why is this (potentially) bad for your website's search engine rankings? There are a couple of things at work here: - Spiders or bots cannot follow redirects. If you are listing your website in a directory in the hope that it will get it spidered faster, you are going to be disappointed if the link pointing to your site is not a natural link.
- Inbound Links: part of the the algorithms search engines use to determine where you should rank for your search term is inbound links. If your link is through a redirect, then that link does not count as an inbound link for you.
- Passing PR: If your link exists naturally on a high page-rank page, the high page-rank page will pass some of that PR juice to your page. Will PR pass when a redirect is used? I think you know the answer to this...
- Not helping, but actually HURTING your website's SE rankings: Google and MSN handle 302 redirects in such a way as to possibly have the "link target's" info transferred to the "link from's" page, and vice-versa. Some sites do a 302 redirect to your listing, and this could have a negative impact on your rankings.
How to tell if you are getting the full benefit of a link to your website:Look at the source. Do a "View Source" and look at the html code for your link. If the href in the anchor tag does not go directly to your site, if you see something that looks like "link.php?YourSite" or "out.cgi?site=123", you are not getting a direct link to your site. *You cannot rely on passing your mouse cursor over the link and checking the status bar at the bottom of the page. Webmasters can make that say anything they want. Check the code! While you are looking at the source code, take another look at the anchor tag that's supposed to be pointing to your website. If it contains rel="nofollow", you are not getting the benefit of the link. If the directory/website owner is telling the search engine spiders to not index the links on the page, why would you want to be listed there? Again, while you're in the source code, check in the <head> section to see if there is a meta tag that looks like: meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow". If there is, see above... Look at the robots.txt to see if the directory/website owner is telling the search engine spiders to 'disallow' the page you are listed on. If you see any of these things, do you WANT to be listed on this website? MySoccerLinks.com is NOT going to get between you and the SE spiders. We're NOT going to try and hoard the PR juice - we're all about spreading the love, and letting the web do it's thing. |
Your reciprocal listing is identified with a special icon, and is pushed to the top of the category.
