Anatomy of Link Exchanges for Hire - 2008 Style   - 1,281 Views, 1 Comment

Basically, someone convinces the owner of a website that they should really place a link on their site to your site - either in exchange for a link back - or for money - or for some other gratuity.

To be clear, this isn’t the owner of the hopefully linked-to website paying a friendly call on another website because they share common interests. This is big business, and it’s some hired shill whose job it is to get as many links to the target site as they can, with the link containing highly specific words (known as “key words”) - the words that people usually search for when looking for whatever the linked-to site is selling to the world. And so long as the linking site is more popular (measured by page rank) than the linked-to site, it’s a score for the linked-to site - the one that has hired the shill. Because with enough of these unnatural, paid-for links, the linked-to site will start turning up when people are searching for those key words in Google, Yahoo, and other search services.

Even we hadn’t realized, however, the level to which this had risen until we came across a job listing on RentACoder.com for someone to do just this! Openly! Brazenly!

Here’s the job listing from RentACoder.com. We’ve changed the names and other identifying facts a bit, but that’s all:

“Request: Link exchange for a Romanian dating website - 25 links.

The website you are promoting has a PR3. Please ask about our website address.

You get access to a different website we own which is also Romanian dating related, it has a link page of PR3 where you can place links to link partners. We are looking for links from related sites with the same page rank - PR3 or higher. You must know how to download/upload file using FTP.

Links must follow these requirements:

* on websites strictly related to this subject: Romanian dating, datings, singles, matchmaking, Romania;
* links must be permanent;
* on pages with PR 3 or higher (it means that page with link to us must be PR 3, not homepage)
* SEO friendly -> direct static (no redirects), no “nofollow” tags, no javascript links, mouse-overs, links can’t be blocked using robots.txt or Meta tag, link pages must be indexed by google
* our links must be on pages with 20 outgoing links at most
* no links from/to forums, guestbooks, FFAs, directories, built-for-link-exchanges, article directories, linkfarms, auto-generated websites, low quality websites, websites with questionable content and spam websites
* anchor text must contain one the keyword(s), no keywords shall be used more than 4 times: “Romanian dating”, “dating in Romania”, “Romanian singles”, “single Romanian women”, “single Romanian men”, “hot Romanian girls”;
* links should be on different Class-C IP addresses
* all links must be acquired by personal contacting webmasters - no automation. You will register a Gmail address of your choice on our account which is dedicated to this project, all outbound and inbound communication MUST be fully saved, links without recorded communication will be denied.

You will provide us with a Excel report contain this data for each link:

- list of the URLs where our link is placed
- PR
- the web master’s name
- the webmaster’s e-mail address
- Anchor text

If you can successfully finish this project, I am willing to make this a long-term relationship and immediatly post a new assignment for you”

Lovely.

We can hardly wait.