Well, I don’t know if you can consider it as evil. But there’s some kind of a trick or deception involved. I actually did this on my old blog during the ituloy angsulong contest. One of the reasons we won. 🙂
We all know that bloggers are the easiest people to get a link, especially bloggers on personal blogs. You go to a blog, send a message on their tag board asking for a link exchange, and you’ll see your link the next day. Most of the time, these links are sitewide links. Links that could really boost your Pagerank.
So, what’s the trick? I used a DHTML drop down box for their “links.” I give a “link” to them by including them on the DHTML drop down box first, then I’ll send a message on their tag board asking for a link exchange, and they will link to me the next day or so after seeing that they are already included in my “link list”.
Actually, it is indeed a link list. You select a blog on the drop down and you’ll be taken to the blog you’ve selected. It functions like a link. However, to the eyes of the search engine bot, they are nothing but codes. It does not pass any link love. So, the links I’m getting from them are one way links, SEO-wise, but functionality-wise, it’s a two-way link. Their links could boost my search engine ranking but my ‘links’ to them will not, but it could send visitors to their blogs the way an ordinary link works.
Well, bloggers with no knowledge on SEO don’t know that. I’ve been there before. For them, you gave them a link, they have to link you back. And that’s it. That’s how I see it before when I didn’t know anything about SEO then. I just kept on exchanging links to any bloggers I stumbled upon, I didn’t care whether it’s from a drop down or not. You gave me a link, I will link you back. That’s it. I didn’t know back then that someone probably is already taking advantage of me. 🙂 But now that I know about it, I just smile and say, those were the days.
Well, actually, this is not new. For example, Topblogs.com.ph requires you to put a code that gives them link love and link back to your site using redirects that do not pass Google juice (the /out folder is on the disallow section of their robots.txt). We give them data and sitewide links, and we got no link love in return? Well, they did not state on their site that I’m not allowed to edit their code, so I took all the liberty to put nofollow tag in it. 🙂
By the way, my link list on my sidebar is getting long. Do I hear someone complaining if I make it a DHTML drop down list? Harharhar!
Update: I opted out of topblogs.com.ph. It seems that nofollowing their code is not allowed by them, judging by their reaction on the comment section of this post. They have the right to nofollow our links because of their spam problem but we don’t have the right to nofollow their sitewide links on their tracking code because they are sending us lots of traffic. Well, that’s unfair for me, so I opted out of this prestigious top blogs. Goodbye 10 visitors/day. I will miss you. LOL!
