Navigation help and link exchange page

[Momo]

I am going to make this a two-part post.

First, I just made a new link exchange page on my site, so If anyone would like, you can exchange links with me for free. The address is http://www.themotec.com/Links.html; all you have to do is click the "add link" link at the bottom.

Also, what do you think about the navigation on that page & the rest of the site? I have gotten a lot of feedback about design, which I am working on to improve, but whan about navigation? I tried to make it as easy as possible, with a site map and return links to each pervious page. What do you think?

[Proteus]

before adding links to your directory, I suggest you to check the info in this post:

http://forum.statcounter.com/phpBB2/...pic.php?t=2816

[Momo]

You mean about google missing pages called links.*?

It would be hard for me to change that, since I am not using SSI yet, I would have to change all the navbars manually*. I could remake the page to "bank.html" or I could just give it a random name.

But I have to change the copyright text soon, so I might be able to.

Not everyone uses google, though. My rankings there have fallen, and now I am also getting many visitors from yahoo. Yahoo seems to have indexed my links page.

[robinev]

I wouldn't spend much time trying to handle the "links" page myth, because it's mostly just that. I've yet to see evidence that Google devalues pages called "links.html". There is, on the other hand, considerable evidence that they treat such pages as they do anything else.

[webado]

Originally Posted by robinev

I wouldn't spend much time trying to handle the "links" page myth, because it's mostly just that. I've yet to see evidence that Google devalues pages called "links.html". There is, on the other hand, considerable evidence that they treat such pages as they do anything else.

I think that they disregard obviously reciprocal links. So link farms are pretty much out.

[trackerm]

Just call it "sex.html" and you'll get lots of hits.

Mark

[Momo]

Lol!

I'm now going to worry too much about it right now. I already got two link exchanges today.

Yahoo indexes all pages and doesn't disregared link pages either. And how can you prove that google does?

[robinev]

Originally Posted by chrisooc

[I think that they disregard obviously reciprocal links. So link farms are pretty much out.

There is considerable speculation about that on SEO sites like WebProWorld. If it matters, it would affect only PageRank score.

But I find it's useful to list reciprocal links to sites that are closely related in subject and audience to my site. I figure readers of my site deserve links that are closely related to the site they're looking at.

Some folks at the SEO sites argue that Google (at least) is able to determine relevancy of a link and will give greater rank to relevant links (whether or not they're reciprocated). I'm not convinced that they can do that, but they might get to that point in the future.

[Momo]

Interesting. About the link relevancy, maybe Google would follow the link and then look at the content/PageRank of the target? That is, if they really look for relevancy in the first place. They certainly find relevant links for their ads. I used a free forum service before (Now I have MySQL so I have my own) and once I started posting about cameras and photography, such ads came up. Before that, there were ads for forums and phpbb becuase those were basically the only words on the page.

[trackerm]

Relevancy may be a key.
On Yahoo search my site gets into a yahoo directory. This then gets me links into a number of spam business directories within that category. Some of these then get listed in Google. I feel this may be part of the reason I pick up a good page ranking from Google 5/10
The other links I have are only to other same or similar category websites or same industry websites.
I certainly am not looking for reciprocal links from outside my industry as I prefer to have as few irrelevant hits as possible. This allows me to better determine where my hits are coming from. Pretty important when I don’t pay for Statcounter!

(that’s why I don’t put my website on here)

Mark