Link pyramid schemes - sounds good, too good...!

[alextj]

Hi guys,

Thanks as always for the support.
I've just received a invitation for what seems to be some kind of pyramid scheme but involving IBLs - you create and host a page with 6 links and the promotion slurp below. Your link goes in at number 1 with your keywords along with 5 others including your referrer at number 2, his referrer at number 3, etc., then you ask other webmasters to do the same and on it goes, giving you some exponentially incredible numbers of IBLs, though not always relevant of course.

It sounds great, but there must be a catch somewhere - i've been following this forum for a while and everything I've learnt here doesn't seem to ward me off - lots if IBLs, there shouldn't be a big impact on my pagerank as I have found lots of dodgy link farms and directories coming up with a link to us for goodness knows what reason, and we have quite a few outgoing links to sites tied to what we do. The only catch is promoting it to other webmasters I suppose - but surely it can't be this easy or otherwise I would have been inundated with these types of offers before...

What do you think guys, should I go ahead, or am I getting in over my head and preparing myself for a nasty shock some morning..
Have a great weekend. Cheers!
Alex

[mlevenhagen]

Hi Alex!

Won't do anything for you IMO.

First, you have no control over the IBLs and their quality and relevance. In fact, I'm willing to bet, those that are participating in these scemes are newbies or spammers with little to contribute in the way of quality.

It goes against the algo grain. You don't want to build to many IBLs to quickly because it is unnatural and will most likeley hurt you more than help. Google can measure the speed and amount of Inbounds you are getting...

And something like this, depending how it is set up, can be just a disguise for someone who is going to spam the pants off of you.

Bottom line it will most likely produce little traffic and is most likely a waste of time.

There is nothing more powerful than hand selected or a natural collection of inbounds.

Just my thoughts,

[dburdon]

Forget it.
No pyramid scheme works for anybody but the first rank of entrants. After 11 iterations you've just about covered the whole world's supply of websites.

Focus on quality and relevance of links.

[alextj]

Thanks mlevenhagen and dburdon - I'd forgotten about the rate of buildup of IBLs catch. It seems like I'm going to have to be a little more patient, thank goodness that comes with the job of teaching though...
Location, location, location I presume!
Thanks,
Alex

[dburdon]

TJ,

I tried looking at your website. It wouldn't load. Do you have enough bandwidth?

[alextj]

dburdon - you almost have me a heart attack!!
It seems to be ok at the moment, but this morning night I was playing around with it trying to get it look ok in Firefox (still not suceeded - there are scrollbars everywhere and it jumps down to the bottom of the screen).
The server should be ok as it's hosted on 1&1, haven't had any problems with them so far...
Please let me know anyway.
Thanks,
Alex

[dburdon]

TJ,

just tried your website again - 23:00 CET. Still won't load on my machine.

I'm connected via 1.1 meg and running Firefox 1.06.

[ctabuk]

It's working fine from mine, I love the speed of translation to English

[alextj]

dburdon,
Thanks for checking it for me, but I suspect it's because of Firefox - I'm having some difficulties getting the site to load properly in anything except Explorer. When I open it in Firefox I have to scroll down to the bottom right corner, or do you get a 404 error? That would be worrying... :0|

ctabuk,
Thanks, and I loved your bb, very informative, and the directory listings had me playing away for hours almost, in fact, I almost forgot to come back here to post. Keep up the good work!
Alex