Coded links are useless?

[Russell Wright]

Hello everyone. Need honest advice! It has to do with money and link value. This is my first post to the forum. Thanks for great info! I am a novice at best.

Question:
On my clients website, http://www.dells.com customers are charged big bucks to list their link on this site. (mostly hotels, B&B's, and waterparks. It is a tourism site. Here is a page with the link they have paid for: http://www.dells.com/b&b.html

When you click on this link, there is an ugly frame-like URL(I think its a frame, right?)= http://www.dells.com/show.php3?return=http://www.dells.com/b&b.html&&website=http://www.bowmansoakhillbedandbreakfast.com

<sorry for that>
Can somebody please tell me, does google even spider this long thingy? How is this type of thing seen by the search engines. Even more important, does the Hotel or customer who is paying 250 bucks for a link on this page get a page rank increase for THEIR little ole website when it is linked with such code? Is the customer paying for the link getting any ranking benefits with such a code, and is dells.com being penalized by such a code?

Any commnets? also, if anybody has a real world analyses of the situation- I would be interested. Obviosuly Dells.com is making lots of money by acquiring paid links, banners etc. My REAL question is: What is a long term strategy for gaining a PR 6 or PR 7 for Dells.com. My hunch is that it would be HELPFUL, not detrimental to remove these framing things???????


Yours, Russell Wright

[OneMoreBite]

That's a good question. I don't find a direct link on the Dells.com to a page with listing about B&B's so how would a visitor to that home page find their listings? Answer: They wouldn't.

Most of this type of "fee for link" that I have seen are worthless to the advertisor and a cash cow for the site owner. If a user does happen to click on "Accomodations," then they are given an opportunity to locate the link to B&B's. Your client's $250 is not just for robots but for people - if they think this site gets traffic, they want someone to find their business, right?

The listings are not very use friendly. You need some kind of keycode to read what is there. The text size is too small, etc. Frankly, if I were looking for a B&B I'd probably just type in the location and B&B, or something similar such as "Big Bear B&B" to find a cabin in Big Bear, California.

I couldn't say for sure whether the search engines could pick out the site url from the PHP code, but I think they can - someone else tell us if I'm wrong?

Do you notice any referrals from this site in your site's stats? That's more telling about whether this advertising money is well spent.

Kathryn