As we have discussed in a number of posts here at Lammo.net, much of the work involved in good SEO is about building links and relationships with appropriate partner sites.

Getting a decent number of inbound links is one of a number of key factors in building your ranking within the search engines’ natural results. This may be achieved through your own hard work or you may have used the services of a decent link building firm. Either way, anyone who has ever run a linking campaign will know that it is extremely hard work.

Unfortunately the challenges are not at an end when someone confirms that they have linked back to you.

Firstly, we are assuming for a moment that they will be kind enough (and organised enough) to actually remember to tell you that they have linked back to you. Assuming that they get this far, it might be useful for you to know from WHERE they have linked to you and yet surprisingly few volunteer this information on a first pass, perhaps assuming that you will be so overcome with excitement at getting a return link (and that you have so much time on your hands) that you will be willing to hunt through what may be an immense site to find that hard-won link.

Let’s assume that you get to the eureka moment of finally discovering that link. Be pleased – of course – but don’t allow the ensuing rush of endorphins to cloud your judgement when checking that the link is valid and of any value. As with so many things in life, the vast majority of link partners will be as honest and hard working as your are. They were, after all, awake enough to realise that linking still has value. Some, however, still feel that by employing some trickery, they can hoodwink you into giving them a link by offering a link of absolutely no value in return.

These characteristics are, to some extent, exacerbated by the fact that we are all operating online in a relatively anonymous fashion. As we all know from some of the bizarre (and in some cases certifiable) responses that we all see to emails, forum postings and the like. It is easy to be brave when hiding behind a laptop in a bedroom somewhere. It is equally easy to be deceitful.

What this ultimately boils down to is not that some link partners simply won’t link to your page — as you’ll be able to check this pretty quickly — but rather that they will use sneaky forms of web trickery to APPEAR to link to you whilst actually devaluing or hiding the link to your page as far as the search engines are concerned. The following are the primary means by which partners attempt to achieve this but new and innovative forms of trickery are almost certainly in the pipeline as web technology becomes ever more complex.

Accidental Trickery
It should also be emphasised that many partners will INADVERTENTLY employ one or more of the following tricks simply through lack of knowledge or because of the publishing software they use. It is therefore important when contacting partners to ask them to correct the link, that you always do so in a friendly and never accusatory style!

1. Nofollow Links
If rel=”nofollow” appears anywhere within the A HREF tag for your link, this is a problem. Originally designed for blogs and forums to prevent unnecessary page rank leakage and to minimise spammy link posts, the nofollow tag is used by the search engines in determining whether a site owner wishes a link to be treated as a ‘full’ link and thus to confer ranking and indeed page rank to the linked-to site. The nofollow tag will defeat many link checking tools as these will find the HREF tag associated with your link and assume it to be valid.

In most cases the only way in which to accurately check for this is to view the source of the page from which the partner is linking to you. The engines’ treatment of this tag varies. Google, for example, states that the nofollow instruction is interpreted literally and the content of any hyperlink with this prefix is completely disregarded. However, several studies have been performed and the results seem to suggest that in fact Google MAY follow the link but will not index the landing page. Both MSN and Yahoo on the other hand openly interpret a nofollow link as a page to be visited, but they do attribute any “link juice” to the linked to page as a result of this link.

Other valid links elsewhere may of course still confer ranking. This is a frustrating but relatively easy to spot issue. Many Content Management Systems (CMS) and blogging / forum solutions may by default change all links to nofollow so don’t assume your new link partner has done this deliberately!

2. Client Side JavaScript Links
It is quite possible to add a link using client side JavaScript. Although the link will function correctly and your page will open when you click on it, there is a good deal of debate as to how well the search engines will index and rank these. Certainly enough debate for them not to be considered as a ’safe’ return link.

Once again, some partners will not be aware that this is an issue and will simply code it this way just because that’s the way they have always done it. There are further variations on this theme including the creation of JavaScript and flash applets wherein it is a near certainty that the links may appear correctly but are very unlikely to be indexed.

3. Redirected Links
This is another old favourite. In many cases these are fairly obvious: when you hover over your ‘link’, the link location displayed in the status bar on your browser will show you that the link is to another page on the link partner’s site rather than to your page. That said, it is easy to manipulate the contents of the status bar using script so the link may appear valid when hovering over it. In all cases, when you click on the link, it will work correctly and your page will open.

However, this is simply because the page on the link partner’s site to which the link is directed will perform a server-side redirect to your page, in much the same way as the affiliate tracking URLs with which we are all familiar will land on the network’s page and then redirect to the relevant merchant page. However, as with affiliate redirect URLs, the redirected link has no SEO value for your site and will not confer ‘link juice’.

Once again, many link partners implement this way quite innocently, assuming that you will gain value from the link and because that is the way in which their publishing software automatically handles it. Others may of course do so for more cynical reasons.

4. Orphaned Pages
Another equally irritating trick (or naive action depending on your interpretation) that link partners sometimes employ is to place a link to your site on an orphaned page on their site. An orphaned page is quite simply a page on a site which isn’t linked to from any other indexed page. Note the use of the word ‘indexed’ here.

A common approach is to provide the link, stating ‘this is linked to from the XYZ page’. Many people will be happy with this, little realising that the XYZ page which may appear to be a credible page, is not itself linked to within the site’s navigation structure and thus has no value to confer to the page on which your link appears. As a result it is impossible for a browsing visitor (or more importantly a search engine spider) to EVER come across this page.

In all cases there must be a traceable path from the site’s home page to the page on which your link is placed. Nothing else will do. Yet again, many partners do this simply because they are out of date as to their own site’s structure, particularly with larger sites so don’t assume this is a deliberate attempt at cheating.

5. Other Issues
As scripting languages and techniques become ever more sophisticated there are a host of other potential issues although most of these are marginal at present. Some sites may use a combination of scripting, HTML and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) techniques to make certain parental controls and standard browser protections result in the non-display of links. This will mean that the link to your page will ‘disappear’ whenever anyone views their page, so though they have technically provided it, in reality it will never be seen and never be used.

In most cases, however, it should be indexable and remember that the primary objective of any link building campaign is not the additional traffic such links may generate in their own right but the ‘link juice’ that they confer in helping your long term rankings.

In some cases partners will simply get the code wrong and the link won’t work; they will link to another page other than the one you have asked for (some have a rigid policy of only linking to a home page); some will use the wrong anchor text in the link; some will use 3-way linking which is fine if not used excessively, wherein you link to their site A and they link back to you from site B. If the sites are on-theme this is generally OK but may also be the hallmark of link farms and ‘link networks’ which are far from fine. We have covered other wider linking issues elsewhere here at lammo.net.

Conclusion
When it comes to linking partners it’s not all cloak and daggers antics despite the warnings above, but there should be a fair exchange of value within each linking relationship. In addition to checking for the above issues (which is far quicker than reading this article!) and requesting any appropriate changes, if you have given them a decent link, you shouldn’t be afraid to request that the link to your site is placed in an appropriate area of your partner’s site, preferably within a well written piece of content that is relevant and original, and not just placed carelessly in a vast list of links on a uninteresting or hidden page where it is pretty much worthless.

Finally, do remember that most link partners are honest (and will expect you to be as well!) and that when you encounter any of the issues above, there is a very good chance that the culprit is their publishing system rather than any deliberate deceit — and tone your requests for change accordingly.

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