Linking Rules of the Big Three

Linking Rules of the Big Three
By Vickie J. Scanlon

Anyone with a website, is always looking for ways to get the search engines to their sites, as well as, get people to their pages. What there is talk on occasion about “cloaking”. Do you know what it is? And is it something to consider, or not to consider?


Cloaking-What is It?
Cloaking what is it? It is a "technique" used by which a website delivers one page to the search engines for indexing, while delivering a page to everyone else.


Does Google Approve?
Google doesn't like cloaking because it spams their crawler. Nor does Google like paid links because of their emphasis on links as a quality indicator. Google's solution is to simply-disallow paid links and punish the sites that disregard their rules by either penalizing or booting them from the index.


Does MSN Approve?
MSN on the other hand, doesn't disallow the practice and state it is more of a gray area. Everyone should do a brake on the "gray area". What does that really say? I don't like it, and soon we may put the brakes to the practice as well. Just give us time.


Does Yahoo Approve?
Nope. If you're caught cloaking your ranking is dropped like a hot potato.

My advise, go with the rules of the big gun "Google" whether you like the rules or not. Because what I have found is-what Google puts into place, soon the others will follow. And I have to ask you-do you want to be indexed by Google or not?

About the Author:
Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: http://www.myaffiliateplace.biz
for free tools, articles, ebooks, affiliate opportunities, products and services, and how to info for the Affiliate Marketer/Internet Marketer. Catch all her articles on her blog- My Affiliate Place Blog.

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Paying for Links-Google Style

This is a short excursion from my posts on Affiliate Marketing, but relevant when you want to make money from your site. It’s called paying for links-and if you have been reading in the forums or hitting some of the blogs, you will know that paying for links and Google’s stance on this issue is in, let’s say, turmoil.

If you’re thinking about paying for some links for rank on your web page or pages, then you may want to be aware of what is in the news.

Paying for links

By Vickie J Scanlon

According to Cutts, Google have no objection to having the paid links, if they are identified-citing the FCC ruling that states that sponsored or advertisements must be clearly labeled. And per Google, one additional factor- it does not pass on page rank. If it does pass on page rank – you could be penalized, or worse yet, you may find many of your pages not being indexed.

So how do you go about doing this? Google suggests some of the following remedies.

1. Redirect through URL that is blocked by your robots.txt file
2. Use a redirect through URL using 302
3. Apply rel="nofollow" attribute to the link (WebProNews)
   

It is probably wise to take notice, because according to this report from Sphinn, Google has been taking notice of the paid links and some have suggested that Google have manually penalized certain sites (delisting their website pages) vs. algorithmically doing so.( WebProNews Article-Is Google Hitting Directory Links).

Many advertisers may, and have bulked at some of these suggestions, indicating that it is stealing/cheating/unfair. However, I guess each Webmaster must decide for themselves - To be indexed, or not to be indexed.

The next question may be- how do you handle a request for a paid link to your site from an outside source? Same rules apply.

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