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I was going through my link exchanges today and noticed an alarming trend that some webmasters are doing. They're setting their robots.txt file to Disallow indexing their Link pages.

We all know that good links can help build traffic and boost your sites importance in search engines...but what does this mean?

It means that some sites are getting huge PageRank ratings from their exchanges, but they are not returning the favor to the Honest Webmasters.

Tsk tsk tsk....I was going to put a link to my Internet Marketing website to one of these sites... but as soon as I found out that they were using this trick I stopped.

It's my opinion that it IS a trick...Honest webmasters are trying to setup legitamite link exchanges to help out other webmasters and people pull this.

Makes me feel bad for the webmasters who aren't checking for this. So, if your doing your link exchanges manually I suggest taking the time to check the incoming links that you have exchanged with. There are 2 quick ways to check listed below.

A site passing these 2 quick checks, is by NO MEANS a guarantee that your getting a fair deal. But, if your like me, you tend to trust most people so if I check a site and it passes, I'll set up a reciporical link to them.

The 2 simple ways to check (these are done manually) are load the main page of the site you've exchanged links with and Click on View - Source in your browser. You want to look for lines in the Head portion that say: "robots" content="nofollow" or something similar.

The second way is to check their robots.txt file if they have one.

Simply type in their address followed by /robots.txt

A Bad Robots.txt file for a link exchange would look something like this:
# All robots will spider the domain
User-agent: *
Disallow:
# Disallow directory /links
User-agent: *
Disallow: /links
# Disallow directory /link-market
User-agent: *
Disallow: /link-market

You'll note that in this example..taken from a real site that offers link exchanges and is even brazen enough to ask for at least PR2 links back, is specifically set to IGNORE their Links pages!!

We'll see what the future holds for sites like these when people catch on to what their doing.

Till next time...be safe and watch your links!

Check out my homepage if you're looking for more information like this.