Most people know by now the importance of having incoming links. Incoming links are those links that other sites display which point to your site. Many of the search engines view these incoming links as a sort of vote for your site’s popularity. The more relevant incoming links you have, the more link popularity, and often the better your rankings in the search engines. Link exchange is one of the main ways that websites go about obtaining incoming links. By placing an outbound link on your site pointing to another site, that site will then place a link to your site on their site. It’s all part and parcel of an effective cosmetic surgery marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, along with link exchange is the concern of link theft. Link theft is when the site you’re exchanging with either fails to link back to your site or deceives you into believing that they have. Sometimes it can simply be chalked up to a mistake, which can of course be resolved, but other time the link theft is intentional. So, just how do you safeguard yourself and your links from theft? The following are tips for avoiding link theft.
- Link last. When a site asks to exchange a link with you and you agree, don’t post your outgoing link until you have received the URL location of your link in their link directory. Don’t link first and give them a chance to forget about you.
- Inspect your link. Visit the page of the website that you’ve exchanged links with and inspect your link in the page’s source code. Your link should be a standard link with no JavaScript code. While you can still get traffic from this link, there will be no benefit in terms of the search engines as they do not process JavaScript.
- Ensure that your link is not a redirect. You can verify that your link is not a redirect by visiting the page on the web site it’s listed on and hovering your mouse over the link. The text that appears should be your domain alone and should not include their domain. In terms of search engines, redirects only benefit that site and not your own, though you will still receive traffic from a redirect.
- Check your links regularly. Even if you determine that your link exchange is on the up and up, be sure to regularly re-check your links.