Cooperative Web

Every webmaster who has personally tried promoting his or her site understands in some sense the value of reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking refers to the agreement between website owners to mutually link to each others’ sites in order to increase both exposure to each others’ visitors as well as link popularity to search engines. Traditionally, this process has been very labor-intensive involving a number of steps to initiate contact, establish acceptable link parameters, and verify and police the reciprocal linking arrangement. Now, a controversial new linking tactic has emerged called “the cooperative reciprocal linking network.”

The purpose of these reciprocal linking networks is ostensibly to utilize “unused advertising space available on the web.” Here’s how it works: the site owner puts a bit of code on each page of his or her site and it serves up hyper-linked text or graphic ads promoting the sites of other cooperative members. Each time a coded page is loaded, the ads change. This is much like how Google Adsense ads work except there is no correlation between the pages’ topics and what ads are served–in other words, the ads are not contextual.

Although dynamically generated, these text ad links can be crawled by search engine spiders. In this sense, the ad linking network can be thought of as an automated method of reciprocal linking capable of providing a boost to each member site’s link popularity.

Participation in the reciprocal linking network is generally free (hence the term “cooperative”) and what one gets out of it depends on what one gives into it. If a webmaster agrees to display five ads per page and his or her site has 100 pages indexed by Google, then that webmaster’s site is given a weight of, say, 500 (5 x 100). The higher one’s “weight,” the more often one’s ads will show on other sites in the network. In order to be an eligible page, the page has to be indexed. The reciprocal linking network checks this using Google’s application program interface or API.

So what’s the controversy? Reciprocal linking network critics contend that because the links are crawl-able by search engine robots and the fact that ads may be irrelevant to the page’s topic area, this is akin to having some sort of reciprocal link farm or scheme designed to influence the web page’s link popularity and search engine ranking. Indeed, one well-known individual’s web page showed up for a while in Google at No. 4 for the term, “eBay” purely because he designed his link ads so that the anchor texts had the word “eBay” in them. Carried across thousands of reciprocal linking participants in the network, it had automated the reciprocal linking process and, at the same time, boosted his page’s link popularity for that particular term.

One would think that this is a bad thing from the search engines’ perspective, right? Not quite. GoogleGuy, the unofficial Google spokesman who regularly posts to website marketing forums, responded to a thread at one forum on this topic. GoogleGuy said he was concerned about linking out to “bad neighborhood” participants in the network (like some Polish site that was apparently cloaking the cooperative ads). GoogleGuy did not say that the network was bad because it had the potential of manipulating rankings, rather he said the worry was “bad neighborhoods.” So, does that mean that if the bad neighborhood problem was under control then the reciprocal linking networks are sanctioned? Maybe…

Here’s how I look at these cooperative reciprocal linking networks: what if Google didn’t exist? What if no search engine existed? What would I do to advertise my site? I would have to participate in reciprocal linking with other sites. But reciprocal linking willy-nilly would not cut it; it would have to be targeted, topic-based reciprocal linking. I would link reciprocally with other like sites. Would I participate in reciprocal linking networks if there were no search engines? Absolutely! It would greatly ease my reciprocal linking time. But the reciprocal linking networks are untargeted as they are currently configured—this is clearly something the operators need to address.

In conclusion, reciprocal linking via cooperative ad networks is a great idea. Google and the other search engines should not have any issues with them in concept. But concept is not reality; in reality, people are joining these networks and trading “weight” to influence link popularity and rankings in the search engines. So, it’s not a perfect solution to the busy webmaster’s reciprocal link management problems. Is participating in a reciprocal link network spamming the search engines? I don’t believe so because the search engines have not clearly defined exactly everything that is or isn’t a spamming technique, and in this business, whether a technique constitutes spamming or not often comes down to a question of degree.

In order to introduce your website to the World Wide Web, first you have to get yourself a domain name. Domain names, in a nutshell, serve as labels that identify your site. Domain names consist of two components: an identifying part and an extension, which results in the traditional ‘companyname.com’ combination.
When you are about to make a purchase from a hosting provider, it would be wise to consider the needs of your future website. These very needs will dictate the resources you require – and the hosting solution that suits you best. For instance, if your plans involve frequent use of multimedia and downloads, you will need a provider that supplies great amounts of disk space and bandwidth.
People are sometimes seduced by companies that offer free hosting service. However, such hosting plans can hardly provide enough resources to accommodate a website meant for business. Free service can not possibly compete with the computing power of dedicated hosting or VPS. So it would be a wise move to evaluate the disk room and bandwidth you need first. It’s also a fact that while free service may not be the best choice for you, it doesn’t mean that good hosting is necessarily expensive. In the end, it all comes down to your provider and your goals.

Microsoft recently released a new Features Relevant to Webmasters. The PDF file detailed not only interface updates on Bing, Microsoft’s have own decision search engine, but also provides SEO tips for webmasters and web publishers. The white paper document contains instructive guidelines on how to create friendly, easy to index websites, as well as ways to make sites look attractive to search engine spiders. The Bing primary function is to bridge users with websites and content across the Internet, a target all search engines aim for. A key objective of Bing is to deliver premium search results and one of the ways the search engine approaches this goal is through a new feature called best match. The Bing will actually separate the official sites of these brands from the rest of the results. One of the cool features Bing has to offer is “Bing Hover links”. It will show a summary of that specific query result, as well as and important links related to that result. The webmasters feel this feature increases qualified traffic and helps searcher to find the information they want without having to leave the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Through the intelligent data extraction, Bing is able to compile use information in the hover link section. The websites saturated with Flash and Silverlight based content often lack readable Meta data text. Titles and descriptions in the HTML source code are so poor, web crawlers hardly notice them. The Bing implemented a new technology capable of extracting limited data.

To the more information is available, the most people adapt the way they search and surf the Internet. The Microsoft has done a number of intense studies to analyze specific search patterns and behaviours. By the result, updates and additions were initiated. Microsoft’s goal is to improve searcher satisfaction by delivering faster, more accurate and complete results.