Most of the articles I post on my weblog are articles written by others. I place them if I think they are worth reading. Sometimes I share my thoughts to you. What do you think of this one?
When I am searching in Google with the query link:www.webmasterslookup.com the result is 43 links to the site. Only 43! Is that the result of month of hard labour, exchanging hundreds of links with other high quality and highly focused websites? I know that the links are there; do I have the wrong approach? This is really annoying me, what is the matter...?
Maybe the other webmasters try to fool me. They hide their link pages so they are not crawled by Google, or they use Meta tags like NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW. If that is true they win a link from me and have no link to me that matters. It is a hell of a job to find out if this is true, checking every link and every site will take month of work. And then they can have done everything by the book while maybe Google thinks their link pages are of a low value, not worth a crawl.
Now my devious mind comes up with a solution that just might the answer. The 6 next steps are the regular steps to be taken in a normal link exchange process. After that I continue with a number of steps with describe the improvements I propose to the link exchange process.
Step 1. Find another website to exchange links with.
Step 2. Place that site on your link page.
Step 3. Invite the other Webmaster to place a link back to your site.
Step 4. If he does keep his link, otherwise delete it.
Step 5. Check if your link is still there on a regular basis. If not ask what is going on etc.
Step 6. Google spidering does the rest.
These first 5 steps are more or less automatically done by link exchange systems like LinkMetro and Gotlinks. If you don't use a link exchange system you have to do this monks work by hand. In all cases you need an administration of the pages where the other websites have placed the link to your website. Otherwise you cannot check step 5, the existence of the link back. In good systems these links back are stored in a database.
Step 7. I propose to make a accessible web page of this administration. Let's call it the Proven Links page.
Step 8. Offer this web page to Google to be crawled.
What happens is that your link back on the other website is found and will be counted. There are a few problems that need to be sorted out:
1. There are many more links to other websites on the link page. These are all counted as links out, which means rank leakage.
I propose a separate website with a low PR with only one purpose: Make Proven Links pages.
2. Would Google approve such a Proven Links website?
Google doesn't like it when we exchange links with the only purpose to get a higher Page Rank. That's why we are very careful about to who we link with. The links must be meaningful. What will happen when we push the links to our site? Does that sound a little bit like Search engine spamming?
I don't know, maybe we can ask for Matt Cutts opinion.
Anyway I don't have the time to make it. Maybe you have and maybe you can earn some money with it too.
Succes, Wim
