I recently got an enquiry from the the author of this site:
http://www.greatestphysicists.com/ (Alexa ranking: 1,496,762)
about a link exchange. I did a quick glance on their main page and the topics seemed good enough, even if the content was a bit light. Then I checked their link page at:
http://www.greatestphysicists.com/links.html

Based on the content this seems like a spoof page targeted at search engines. My guess is that this technique aims to leak ranking from relevant pages to the non-relevant links in the link pages.

Have you encountered this often before? My first guess is that it will only hurt your main site to do such an link exchange.

I wouldn't exchange links. There's no targeting for you, he has no traffic, from the simple text design it's obvious he's targeted search engines and won't have any real user base, plus with all the other crappy links he has you'll get nothing in return.

Thing that pisses me off is google basically rewards guys for doing that garbage. For example, that garbage url "buy-viagra-online-sales.com". You'd think the longer the url and if has - marks in it they should give it a big fat page rank of zero. Some loser spam site took "arcade-town.com" trying to scam my users to they're site which is full of low brow links to casino sites and so forth.

NOTE TO EVERYONE! Grab all versions of your url that could place "-" sign between any syllables plus the .net and .org extensions. Do it before someone else does! Even my old url freewebgames.com somebody ripped for free-web-games.com.

I cant access the page

They must be gone already

NOTE TO EVERYONE! Grab all versions of your url that could place "-" sign between any syllables plus the .net and .org extensions. Do it before someone else does! Even my old url freewebgames.com somebody ripped for free-web-games.com.
Google changes its ranking scheme fairly regularly. I wouldn't spend TOO much money taking advantage of a loophole that might not be there four months from now.

Originally posted by yeahgofigure
I wouldn't exchange links. There's no targeting for you, he has no traffic, from the simple text design it's obvious he's targeted search engines and won't have any real user base, plus with all the other crappy links he has you'll get nothing in return.


A note on Alexa, don't count on them giving you an accurate idea of the traffic a site gets. I know DIY Games.com (and DIYG.com) are ranked horribly low in Alexa, but we get a decent amount of traffic, much more than some sites that a ranked much higher than us.

I basically agree with all those people that say avoid tricks and tricky sites. It can only hurt you in the end. Well formatted pages and quality content, and quality links (with relevent link text) from other *relevent* sites is the way to go. You don't need to do anything fancy. Building up a good link base and quality site takes time but once it's in place your hold on a good ranking is solid. Lots of sites lost ground in the recent google florida update but you'll notice dexterity didn't move. No tricks. Lots of good well-formatted pages and incoming links.

Originally posted by Coyote
I wouldn't spend TOO much money taking advantage of a (google) loophole that might not be there four months from now.

Trick is the loophole is there, has been for quite a while, and probably won't change. For example, "arcade-town.com", I get good search engine hits from my name and they count on siphoning off some. It's been so succesful they even invested to upgrade their site. Not the sign of someone that plans on stopping soon. Traffic is a precious commodity and in long run will lose more than $7.99 it costs to register each version of url on godaddy.

Seriously, everyone really should consider buying all relevant versions of their site url.

This commercial brought to you by the register your domains councel :-)

btw - Karma just came to bite me in the a--. Figures as soon as I talk some loser I had displeasure of linking with before took arcadetown.us and launched site trying to steal my name recognition.

I passed on .us version thinking was worthless. Failed to take my own advice all the way out. :mad: