Case Study – Link Exchange Scam

Quality link exchanges are a good way to increase your website visitors and link popularity, and improve your page rankings in search engines. Increasing the number of back links will improve your page rank, and you will get higher ranking in the search engine searches.

GoldenTwine website has an honest reciprocal link exchange with referrals from related and appropriate web sites for mutual benefits. I accept an offer only if the quality of back link suits my site. I also offer one-way link for a fees on a page of your choice except Home page to match your keywords to earn some revenue to maintain my website and blog. I do it transparently on a modest scale offering you do follow links on Google indexed and cached page, and linked to main navigation on home and all other pages. If a page is indexed then it is worth having your link on it, irrespective of PR.

GoldenTwine Link Exchange Page Indexed on Google

But link exchanges with disreputable sites can actually hurt your Google page rank, and even lead to a penalty by Google.

On my reciprocal link exchange page I provide a link exchange form for webmasters who would like to exchange links with my site. I often get responses for link exchange. Most of them offer bad or inappropriate link backs to my site with the sole purpose of manipulating their website rankings. So you must be very careful in choosing a web site to exchange link.

The reciprocal link scam has now become a common practice. It is an easy trap to fall into as even reputed sites are hiring SEO consultants for this scam. I have decided to present case studies on my blog to expose link exchange scams.

They first use bots to harvest links from hundreds of sites. They create a Resources page with dozens of sub-pages. They put these bot harvested links in those dubious pages, and then either send you an unsolicited email or fill up your link exchange form, if you have one. They will give you a decent title and description for their own site with link to their home page and show you your inappropriate link on one of their so called resources sub-pages. Once you have given them a decent link they would eventually remove your link.

Here is one original link request form filled in on my site:

The link to their resource page and subpages are SEO optmized (deeply buried in a keyword-rich URL):
http://www.datarecoverysoftware.com/datarecoverysoftware/resource.html

When I looked into the source page, I found SEO optmized title and description tags:

Not only that the links to various sub-pages where your links are published is a flash object that is not spidered by search engines.

And see below how lousy is the link to my website on one of their resouce sub-pages:
http://www.datarecoverysoftware.com/datarecoverysoftware/software22.html

Here is yet another similar example:

In this case they have published the title of my Reciprocal Link Exchange page though connecting to my Home Page. My Home page has SEO compliant title, description and keywords.

The link to their resource page and subpages are SEO optmized (deeply buried in a keyword-rich URL) like the previous example:
http://www.drpudatabase.com/drpudatabase/dbtools-39.html

I receive such requests from many other companies like below:

SMS Marketing
http://www.sendgroupsms.com
sendgroupsms.com provides bulk SMS messaging software to send free SMS to all mobile networks.

They had published my link on the following page, and removed it later to make room for more links:
http://www.sendgroupsms.com/bulk-sms/sgs14.html

Data recovery
http://www.recoverybull.com
Download available to recover lost data files from various removable media drives of any brands and capacity.

This case study illustrates yet another link scam to get back links by deceiving webmasters who gain nothing. I have brought to your notice how these scams work, now it’s your responsibility to avoid such link scams.

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