How to Avoid Cons and Pushers when Building Links
Mar 25, 2009 by Aaron Rubman
Before asking a site to include a link back to your home page – take a moment to check it out. Remember, your URL is something like your address. You want clients to know where to find you, but you probably don’t want to extend that invitation to online con artists and pushers. Try and make sure you know which you’re dealing with.
What to look for in a legitimate site:
Whether or not someone is a competent professional in the real world, if they do not convey their professionalism online, their site will not be a good place to build links. If you’re not comfortable making that call on your own, here are a few warning signs that someone is not taking their web presence seriously.
- The site is littered with misspellings.
- The site or blog looks exactly like the last five you visited.
- The images don’t load.
- They haven’t bothered to change default content (e.g. if you see “Edit Me” anywhere on the page, you should probably move along).
Most legitimate sites also have some sort of organizational theme. As you move from one page to another, you should be able to tell how the different pages are related. If you do find a page or blog-entry that seems to be remarkably off topic, look to see if it has been acknowledged as such (some sites intentionally maintain off-topic forums and blogs in order to keep such content from appearing elsewhere in the site).
Looking through the site also provides you a chance to figure out what you can offer to the site’s regular visitors. If you can outline these benefits to the site owner, they will be more likely to include a link to your site on their own.
But before you do that, let’s take a moment to look at…
How to spot “cons” when building links:
Does the company match the business card? In other words, does the content of the website match its URL? There are, unfortunately, tricks that can make a site look like all things to all people. Unscrupulous link builders and online con artists who are only in it for a quick buck will use any such trick they can find.
You should also avoid sites that offer you an option to buy favorable blog entries. It may seem like a great deal at first blush, but if you take a moment to look at it from a consumer’s point of view, you should be able to find the flaw in this approach. Would you trust the review of someone who advertises that his or her good opinion is for sale?
Google doesn’t either.
How to spot “pushers” when building links:
This should be fairly easy. Look in the SPAM folder of your e-mail account. Read through all the stuff that you and everyone else usually deletes without a second glance. That’s what you want to avoid.
Unless you want to be part of the online Skid Row, do not request links from anyone linking to porn, online gambling, hacked software, virility drug sites, or the like.
You should also be wary of any site that generates “pop-up” or “pop-under” advertisements (i.e. sites that create new windows either in front of or behind your active window). You should especially avoid sites that use this as a tactic to keep you from navigating away. If nothing else, it indicates that they expect that people will want to leave without clicking through the links they’ve provided.
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[...] I suggested in my blog on how to avoid linking to online cons and pushers, one of the things that people will look for when deciding if they want to link to your site is [...]