When NOT to trade links

I just checked 6 reciprocal link requests and deleted them all for one or more of the reasons mentioned below.

Having outgoing links on a page can drain Page Rank (PR) from your page, and the less PR your pages have that are linking back to the home page the less PR the home page has and this affects the keyword rank of the whole website. So, a lot of site owners or webmasters try different ways to hide outgoing links from search engines such as the following:

1. Putting the outgoing links within a framed page so search engines can't see it
2. Putting no/index or no/follow on the meta tag at top of the page
3. Putting rel="nofollow" on the link to the page with outgoing links
4. Setting up the link as "hidden" in CSS
5. Use Javascript so it shows in status bar but search engines can't see it

Even if none of the above are in evidence it also helps to look at the home page for a link to the page your link will appear on. If they don't provide a link to that page from the home page it will likely never be seen by visitors and possibly not search engines either as it may be an orphan page (i.e., you can get to it via the link they send you but you can't get there via their home page).

If they stick the link on the bottom of their page instead of in a menu at the top, then it can be easily removed at a later date.

Some sites will accept links for awhile until they get enough content for their link pages and then they prevent those pages from being followed at a later date.

These tricks make it hardly worth your time to ever trade links.

Lori Eldridge
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