Do not be deceived by the hidden snares of ruthless website owners who promise to enter into a reciprocal link exchange program with you and go back on their deal. Never become victims of their traps.

It is more than a nightmare experience for any webmaster to walk into the unscrupulous traps of website owners who fail to honor their own deals. For instance, Danny came across a website owner who agreed to exchange links, and enjoy mutual benefit of added traffic exchange and boost in search engine rankings.

Danny was let down by the webmaster as he did not play fair but placed Danny's links as hidden text. It was not surprising to Danny when he discovered the reason why he did not get any traffic from that site. Moreover, the link partner's site's return link was worthless and was only harming Danny's ranking prospectus with the search engines as the link partner's site was banned by Google and Danny's site too was penalized making Danny a victim. Do not allow this to happen even in the worst of your nightmares.

No we website owner including you is an exception, to their craving for increased number of incoming links. The reason is that the additional links boost your placement in search engine results pages (SERPs). Each link has its own value only that the range of their importance, points they bring and what they contribute to your page rank vary. So, it is obvious that why website owners vie on incoming links and link exchanges.

The situation gets complicated only when there is a black sheep in this fair deal market, a deceitful webmaster who fails to keep his/her words and fail to honor his/her deal. Through their unethical practices they not only fail to give a prominent place to your link they also make the wrath of search engines descend upon your site. Basically all these mean nothing but that you got cheated.

Not all webmasters are evil, there are good webmasters as well, and there are good number of successful reciprocal link exchange programs as well. There are honest link partners who supply fair and equitable links and bar themselves from dishonest and questionable SEO techniques.

In this situation all that you have to be vigilant is that you make sure that you analyze your link partners site thoroughly before you engage in any sort of link exchange, because a dishonest webmaster is being dishonest of his/her own free accord and not out of his/her ignorance. It would be unwise to walk straight into their traps. Such webmasters use a variety of shady tricks which you yourself should be aware of to keep yourself guarded. Remember not to use those shady trick but just keep yourself abreast of such practices.

Some ruthless website owners use JavaScript to write your links rather than regular HTML. But JavaScript prevents PageRank transfer. Though the usage of JavaScript has its own place in website architecture, it is taken foul advantage by the some unscrupulous webmasters to prevent the passing of any Google PageRank. It might be the case in some search engine optimization technicians that they are lead by their own faulty assumptions that search engine spiders crawl Java links and that Google transfers the PageRank along for Java links as well. However, it is not the case with most cases, the SEO technicians are well aware of the problems involved with JavaScript and intentionally take advantage of these problems to scapegoat their unassuming link partners.

Another practice is to re-route your link to block the spiders from crawling and to block transfer of PageRank. In this case the code is often coded in such a way it appears that it appears to be a standard link. Link partners who engage in this practice should be shunned away with contempt.

The re-routing technique is sometimes used by the webmasters to send traffic away from their site through outbound links. It takes pretty bad turn if such re-routing is going to lead visitors to competitor's site or to a complementary business site which has your competitor's links.

Robots.txt

By coding robot.txt to "No Follow", the search engine spiders will be blocked from crawling the page. Some unscrupulous web masters place exchanged links in this page, in such cases your page will never make it to the search engines. This not only blocks the spiders from crawling but it also blocks PageRank transfer with the added disadvantage of not getting any traffic through link popularity.

One can produce the same "No Follow" text in Robot.txt by placing your link on a frames web page that has no coding request for the search engine spiders to crawl and index the page.

Your link partner would have promptly placed the links as agreed seemingly honoring his deal with you, but if you fail to pay close attention, you would miss just not the tip of the iceberg but the entire iceberg. Sometimes you will find your link placed in a non-linked orphan page that is not part of the sitemap. Such a page will not be traced by any of the directories or subdirectories hence having no value in terms of traffic or link popularity.

There are some straightforward tricks that needs no special expertise to spot. One such problem is daylight breach of the contract. Your link partner simply fails to place the return link as agreed hoping that you will not check your return link.

Or variation of this can be found in your link partner linking you for a month after which your link disappears from their site. You should be on your guards to constantly check on your link partner's website to ensure your link partner has not played foul.

Identifying reliable website owners with whom you can enter into productive link exchange has become a difficult task. However, there are some basic precautions you can take to prevent yourself from walking into the traps of dishonest website owners and protect your online business.

A website owner may get thousands of requests for reciprocal link exchange, being over enthusiastic about increasing their link popularity and page ranking, website owners exercise little caution while accepting these offers and fail to analyze these sites thoroughly. The slogan here should be "Think first! Link later!" As the saying goes, "Fools rush in where the angels fear to tread." This should not become true in the way you enter into a reciprocal link exchange program.

Visit their website closely checking and cross checking their links pages, their Google PageRank, look for all the malpractices discussed above such as orphan page links, hidden text links, cloaked texts, robot.txt "No Follow" denials etc. If you can smell the rat do it in good time, when you still have the leeway to your advantage. Because search engines do not tolerate carelessness and you will be penalized for entering into a pact with a highly dubious site.

Confirm before you approve any link exchange that the site with which you are exchanging links is a relevant site with theme and topic related to your site. Closely related pages will bring in more points in the search engine algorithm. Your site might be a well themed page with good PageRank exchanging link with a page with poor page rank black listed by the search engine this way you will ruin your existing position in the search listings. On the other hand, you may even be penalized for your incautious move.

Just ignore those requests from web owners who are just interested in anchor text and not really interested in your links. This is clear unfair exchange; rather here, there is no exchange as such. While trying to boost your chances of receiving strong anchor text, provide the codes that you have already written with keyword rich phrases. This should help you handle the deceitful web owners.

After assessing a potential link partner's site if you should feel that the site will not offer you a good deal you should in no way feel compelled to go ahead with the exchange or any kind of partnership.

To conclude, it has to be understood and admitted that not everyone is as honest as they seem or claim. Check every link exchange request, their website, possible SEO mal practices of the site. Clarify in your mind first how a particular partnership will promote your online business, how much they are relevant to your business, product, or service. Make use of the control you have on search engine ranking to the extent you can have it and above all while you still have it.