John Currie
10-21-2004, 02:48 AM
Hi
I got this email this morning and on further investigation, found it to be true. This webmaster is disallowing the links directory from being spidered, effectively cheating all his link parners.
This is the email I recieved:
Hi, I am contacting you because you appear to be a link partner of at
least one of these sites:
http://www.stress-anxiety-depression.org/
http://www.acne-answers.org/
http://www.make-up-cosmetics.com/
http://www.menopause-pms-progesterone.org/
Most likely you were contact by them to exchange links, which you
gladly did. Links are a great way to help make your site rank better
in the search engines, most notably, Google.
With google, however, it is important that its spider, Googlebot, is
allowed to visit the page in which your link appears. Unfortunately
the webmaster of these site(s) has been employing unscrupulous
practices in regards to link exchanges. Looking at their robots.txt
file (such as http://www.acne-answers.org/robots.txt) you can clearly
see that spiders are not allowed in their /partners directory. The
main purpose for most link exchanges is to gain link popularity; not
allowing a spider to visit the link page that your link is on makes
the link absolutely worthless!
This means that while you are helping one or more of these websites with their link popularity, they are trying to scam you and not give
you any back. This is shady business and should not be allowed.
I would highly recommend removing the link(s) to these site(s) and contacting the webmaster informing that you do not want to trade links
with unfair terms.
I sent you this email because they tried to scam me, but unfortunately they finally got caught.
This is what the robots.txt file looks like at http://www.acne-answers.org/robots.txt
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /partners/
Wow, does this mean we have to check all our link parners robots.txt file?
I got this email this morning and on further investigation, found it to be true. This webmaster is disallowing the links directory from being spidered, effectively cheating all his link parners.
This is the email I recieved:
Hi, I am contacting you because you appear to be a link partner of at
least one of these sites:
http://www.stress-anxiety-depression.org/
http://www.acne-answers.org/
http://www.make-up-cosmetics.com/
http://www.menopause-pms-progesterone.org/
Most likely you were contact by them to exchange links, which you
gladly did. Links are a great way to help make your site rank better
in the search engines, most notably, Google.
With google, however, it is important that its spider, Googlebot, is
allowed to visit the page in which your link appears. Unfortunately
the webmaster of these site(s) has been employing unscrupulous
practices in regards to link exchanges. Looking at their robots.txt
file (such as http://www.acne-answers.org/robots.txt) you can clearly
see that spiders are not allowed in their /partners directory. The
main purpose for most link exchanges is to gain link popularity; not
allowing a spider to visit the link page that your link is on makes
the link absolutely worthless!
This means that while you are helping one or more of these websites with their link popularity, they are trying to scam you and not give
you any back. This is shady business and should not be allowed.
I would highly recommend removing the link(s) to these site(s) and contacting the webmaster informing that you do not want to trade links
with unfair terms.
I sent you this email because they tried to scam me, but unfortunately they finally got caught.
This is what the robots.txt file looks like at http://www.acne-answers.org/robots.txt
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /partners/
Wow, does this mean we have to check all our link parners robots.txt file?