Reciprocal Linking Scams, What to look for and How to avoid them
Reciprocal linking scams have increased immensely during the
past year. Initially we thought that this problem only related
to gambling and casino related websites but an audit of our
commercial link partners suggests that it is a serious problem
within the broader online community.
Over the past eighteen months, we noticed that our page rank was
slowly declining despite the fact that we were continually
adding new link partners to our link directory. We had slipped
from a five down to a two before we finally identified the exact
cause of the problem. Out of the first 100 links on our anchor
site, only seven were still being reciprocated.
We recrawled the sites where no link was found with the second
spider and got exactly the same result. Then we started manually
checking the sites where no link back was found and started
discovering patterns of deliberate link fraud.
The scams in order of popularity amongst the scammers
1. The link on the home page to the link directory remained but
clicking on it or specific directory links produced a template
style page with a few casino banners or simply a page with no
directory content