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TOP 100 is bad!!!
Posted by: Majicko
- August 16, 2007
Have any of you webmasters out there ever seen those dynamic TOP 100 site directories? If you've had a website for longer than a few months, you've probably seen a lot of them and likely registered with several of them. TOP100s look something like these:   One of the first rules to making money with your website is to generate traffic. One of first rules to generating traffic is building search engine rank. You've no doubt read that getting a high search engine rank requires, among other things, reciprocal linking with other sites. The more websites that link to you, the more popular your site appears to the search engine and, thus the higher your page rank becomes. This is the reason you have probably gone around to TONS and TONS of these TOP100 directories, registering with each one that would accept your site, and pray the search engines find you through them all. Unfortunately, you're going to be very disappointed. Most search engines these days, particularly Google, will not index the links in these directories. Let me explain why. META Refresh Back in the day, sly and malicious webmasters would attempt to fool search engines into thinking their sites had more or different content than they really did by using the infamous "META refresh" tag. This HTML tag, for those of you who don't know, allows the webmaster to redirect viewers to other pages or other sites automatically when someone enters a page with this tag in it. Malicious web designers would sucker the search engines into indexing a page that would be rich with all kinds of relative content so they would get indexed in various places in search engine results. A user would see this page in the search results, click on it, and then the META refresh tag would automatically forward the user to a completely different site, often a porn site. This got very annoying for many search engine users. In order to resolve this annoyance, search engines set their crawlers to ignore pages that contain the refresh tag. Counting Clicks What does this abusive tag have to do with TOP 100 directories? Well, these directories typically use the META refresh tag on their links instead of linking directly to the sites within their directory. This is how they are able to count how many people click on the links in their directory and how they can assign rank to popular site. In order to count what links are clicked, the link takes you an outgoing page with a dynamic script (i.e. "linkout.php?id=322") that counts the click, then uses the refresh tag to forward you to your proper destination. This is a clever and effective system, but search engines will not acknowledge these links! Webmasters who design these reciprocal link programs and TOP 100 directory scripts have a difficult choice to make. Do they want to favor link popularity by putting popular links at the top? Or do they want to give their partner sites their reciprocal link points for SEO purposes? Guess which choice they normally choose. That's right! They favor popular links and ignore the search engine issue entirely, assuming none of their partner sites will know the difference. Resolution If you want your site to get its search engine points, register with directories that actually point their links at the actual sites they are suppose to go to and not through some outgoing page. Point your mouse at the links and see if that is where they go. It may be necessary to check the source code of the directory to ensure some javascript isn't faking the status bar of your browser. For you webmasters out there who run these directories, here is a resolution for you...Ajax!!! With a little knowledge of Ajax, you can write a dynamic function that will point directly to your partner sites and count the clicks at the same time. You will have the best of both worlds and everyone will be happy. Sounds nice, doesn't it? Majicko uses this technique for the purposes I have mentioned herein. The external link system of Majicko not only counts clicks and arranges popular sites to the top of the list, but it also links directly to each partner site without using deceptive Javascript.  |
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Article Posted by: Majicko |
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