How To Avoid Link Theft and Link Robbers

Fair business is what we all want on the internet. However, not all aspects of the internet are fair! This is very true to linking. Have you experienced linking to a particular website that promised to provide your website with a link back but actually did not? This is a common scenario in linking. Some websites don’t actually link back or sometimes they just make you think they gave your website a link when they really did not.

Don’t Be A Victim Of Link Theft

This is called link theft – just one of the many tricks that other websites employ. Although there are times that your link to other websites may be actually lost due to accidents, most of the time it is because these websites are trying to trick you. Don’t be a victim! Know when a website plans to trick you. Here are some tips to identify whether or not a particular website is a link thief and what to do to avoid it:

• Ask Your Link’s URL Location



Before you even exchange links to other websites, ask them first about your link’s URL location. The reason behind this is that they might just forget (or intentionally forget) to give your website a link back if you have already given them a link to their website.

• Link’s Visual Deception



Examine your website’s link on a particular site. Check whether your link will be spidered or not. You can do this by clicking on “View Source Code” of the page that carries your website’s link. Check whether your link follows the standard text link. The standard text link follows this form:

a href=”http://www.yourdomainname.com/” target=”_blank>Link Anchor Text




If your link does not follow this format, that means the search engines will most likely be unable to spider it. The search engine spiders may think that your website’s link does not exist at all. This is very true especially if you find this format for your link:

onclick="javascript:newWindow('http://www.yourdomain.com.’)”>Anchor Text



• Make Sure Your Link Will Not Redirect



How can you check whether your link will just redirect to the same website when clicked? Try pointing your mouse’s cursor on your link and check the text that appears on the status bar of your web browser. What should appear on the status bar is the url of your website on this format:

http://www.yoursite.com




If what appears on the status bar is something like this, then your link is being put through a redirect!

http://www.sitedomain.com/page.html”



• Dynamically Generated Link Pages



Avoid linking on a dynamically generated link page. How will you identify a dynamically generated link page? If it looks like this, then it’s a dynamically generated link page. The search engines wont be able to read pages like this.

http://www.domainname.com/links/index.php?&brbf=aw

Don’t let these thieves benefit from your website. Identify them and avoid them. Websites who does link stealing will not last long so don’t be one of them!

Link theft will not be beneficial to your website’s rank and traffic. We know what your website needs to rank high and drive more traffic, please see our Web Marketing Services or apply for a Free Website Analysis.