Reciprocal Links Info Help

[LD]

If I am negotiating reciprocal links with "like" businesses and find no direct link from their home page to their links page (or no site map either), will their links page have lesser value than a site that has direct links? In other words if the links page appears to be orphaned, will Google find and crawl the page?

[Weedy Lady]

Why would you bother with reciprocal links to a site that will never send you a visitor because their links page is orphaned? I refuse to do these kinds of links and always let the web master know the reason.

To me this is a sneaky, cheap way for sites to try to get inbound links while offering absolutely nothing in return.

And google isn't going to give any credit to orphaned pages either.

[timmathews.com]

Well said weedy lady...
But, what if there are other inbound links to the link page?

[dburdon]

LD,

check the Google cache.

1. If the page is not listed in the Google index then forget it.
2. Note the date of the cache. The more recent the better.

[LD]

I use a couple of reciprocal link exchange services. After initially submitting a similar question to "support" about not finding a direct link from a possible partners index page to the links page their answer was something like... "as long as the links page is no further than one level below the index page, Google will find the links page." I thought this a bit strange, as I understood the bots to follow links throughout a site.

[scanmonkey]

LD,

I believe that an orphan page will evidently get crawled. But it really is a b.s. link, the orphan page is not going to get indexed and cached.

I think you should read this thread:
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=62858

Originally Posted by mike

Eric asked; "if every one of the major search engines dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, would you be out of business?" If you have enough "relevant" sites pointing to your page you wont. PR be damned.

The moral of the story is essentially quit putting so much stock in that little green bar and focus more on finding vertically aligned sites to link to your own.

[OneMoreBite]

Isn't it even more important that a visitor will never see that page? I realize the importance of the search engines, but frankly, if you keep the site's visitors in mind, then you see the folly of bothering with a site that doesn't make it easy to find their links or resources pages.

I used to take time to send a message to site owners but no longer do as I can't think of a single time when someone said, "Gee, thanks for enlightening us. We'll change our ways pronto." LOL

Kathryn