The things some webmasters do for link exchanges never cease to amaze me. This page lists, in brief, some of the shady practices I’ve witnessed while processing link exchange requests.

1. Using robots meta tags to instruct search engine spiders not to index and or follow links on the links pages or directories.
2. Using robots.txt to instruct search engine spiders not to visit the links directory or pages.
3. Using the attribute rel=”nofollow” to let search engine spiders know not to attribute link popularity to the resulting page of the link.
4. Using javascript to hide links from search engine spiders.
5. Using tracking URLs and redirected URLs.
6. Using orphaned links pages / directories (link pages and directories not linked to).
7. Using frames or iframes so the page which actually contains your link doesn’t have much link popularity, or even worse, is orphaned.
8. Using other people’s / other site’s links page as the reciprocal links page (pretending to be a triangular link exchange).
9. Asking for link exchanges with multiple sites (pretending to ask for triangular link exchanges), but only giving one link. For example, they have 3 sites, A, B and C. Their site A links to your site D, and then they ask for link exchange between D and A, D and B, and D and C, stating that the reciprocal link is from site A. That way you give them 3 links and they give you 1 link in return.

I’m always open and willing to consider any and all link exchange requests, but these practices simply wastes webmaster’s time and patience.

More details of these shady link exchange practices can be found here.