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Article by LinksManager.com Staff -
© 2006, Reproduction without permission prohibited.
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Anyone, anywhere in the world can park in front of a computer and send out bulk lots of link requests in an attempt to bolster their own sites' reach or search-engine rankings. |
Spam-Proofing Incoming Link Requests
Spam by any other name is still ugly!
Even those who enjoy nothing better than lunching on a thick slab of processed meat between two pieces of Wonder Bread would be unlikely to describe Spam as handsome, pretty, or elegant. It's just a flat out ugly thing. And it remains ugly no matter how it's packaged. Crammed in its can, mounded on a plate, or jamming your email inbox is unsightly and demands to be dealt with before rot and rank runs rampant.
You may never have thought of it as such, but wildly inappropriate approaches from webmasters or link farmers are nothing, more or less, than a form of spam. The problem is simple. Anyone, anywhere in the world can park in front of a computer and send out bulk lots of link requests in an attempt to bolster their own sites' reach or search-engine rankings. Most often, people who solicit links without any concern for site compatibility or appropriateness are violating search-engine guidelines and producing what could be called, very appropriately, "garbage" websites.
Inadvertently linking to sites like those could negatively impact both your search engine placement and your credibility with prospective customers. Since you can't feed this particular kind of spam to your dog or choke it down yourself, the question becomes how to deal with it with a minimum commitment of time, effort, and risk. Fortunately, LinksManager, being a editor-based link management solution, automatically protects you from the most insidious link outlaws, the bandits who attempt to add links to your site without your knowledge. You control who you will link to when you use LinksManager to manage your link resources.
Unfortunately, the same thing that makes the Web the greatest mass communications system in history - virtually unlimited accessibility - makes it impossible to automatically weed out every irritating, offensive, negative, irrelevant and potentially harmful pitch that unscrupulous operators send your way. You can, however, significantly limit the number of irrelevant link requests you receive by taking advantage of the powerful safeguards build into Linksmanager and it's sister site, LinkPartners.com.
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You can, however, significantly limit the number of irrelevant link requests you receive by taking advantage of the powerful safeguards build into Linksmanager. |
Perhaps the most important of these is the fact that all LinkPartners member sites are reviewed and approved or rejected by human editors before they are listed on LinkPartners.com. If you get a link exchange request from a site listed on LinkPartners.com you can be assured that the site does not engage in unethical linking practices, does not "live" in what Google and other search engines consider a "bad neighborhood," is not offline and unavailable and does not encourage or profit from illegal activity.
To save webmasters time and energy in considering link exchange requests, LinkPartners can further refine the selection of link requests you receive via its optional Swap Permissions feature. Available from either your free LinkPartners account or your LinksManager Account Control Panel, Swap Permissions allows you to limit the genres of sites soliciting a link with your site via LinkPartners simply by checking off the types of sites you wish to exchange -- or not exchange -- with.
While Swap Permissions is a great tool for cutting link exchange-request clutter, it is only applicable to links solicited through LinkPartners. To pre-screen requests made through your public "Add Link" page, LinksManager incorporates a powerful, user-configurable Blacklist which will automatically send a "request denied" message to unwanted link partners and prevent their solicitation from appearing in your Approve/Delete queue, where you might inadvertently add it to your site. Once the Blacklist is enabled via the LinksManager Control Panel, LinksManager automatically compares the site name, URL, description, and email address field of incoming link requests to the keywords you added to the Blacklist. If it finds a match, the request is automatically rejected. Needless to say, blacklisting is extremely effective at eliminating repeated linking requests originating from "bad neighborhoods" or sites advocating products or services that are incompatible with your linking strategy, or which violate your morals, ethics or principals.
On the other hand, this is one of LinksManager's suite of power tools that should be used with caution in case you unwittingly reject requests from relevant sites offering an advantageous linking opportunity. Therefore, we strongly recommend you read and understand the LinksManager Support Knowledgebase article How does the Blacklist feature work? before enabling your own blacklist.
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Blacklisting is extremely effective at eliminating repeated linking requests originating from "bad neighborhoods" or sites advocating products or services that are incompatible with your linking strategy. |
Here is an example. Let's say you are getting repeated link requests from a gambling site and your site has nothing to do with gambling. Place the keyword "gambling" in your blacklist and webmasters will be unable to submit link requests to your LinksManager account from your public add link form. To eliminate other undesirable link-exchange requests via email, you might consider using the same keywords you used in your blacklist to create a custom filter (usually referred to as a "rule" in Microsoft Outlook) in your email client. In fact, you might consider making one filter that sends all email referring to "link exchange" or "link trade" to a dedicated mailbox (or Personal Folder in Outlook) and a second filter that kicks all of those messages containing your keywords into the "junk" or "trash" box. This method has the advantage of keeping all outside correspondence relating to links you have accepted or are considering in one place for easy future access while still preventing you from being harassed by link exploiters.
While we are on this topic, now is a good time to remind you that whenever you receive link exchange requests via email, simply reply to the email and point the webmaster to your public add link form. LinksManager and it's powerful blacklist feature will then take over for you and reject any link requests submitted to your account that include keywords in your Blacklist.
However you decide to handle the problem of link-request spam, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that links and link pages, though they are among your most potent business tools, are NOT your business. Your business consists of the products and/or services you are offering for sale.
Links are trees, what you do for a living is the forest. The more blood, sweat and tears you have to invest in link management, the less time, energy and enthusiasm you'll have for your real work. An intelligent, ethical linking agenda empowered by editor based software such as LinksManager and LinkPartners will speed you through the trees and reward you with many additional productive hours in the forest.
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