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7 Top Ways to Avoid Link Theft

If you have a link directory on a website, how do you stop link theft by sites that don't link back, or trick you into thinking they do?

Whether link theft is anything to get concerned about depends on how many links your website has, the quality of those links (Google Page Rank) and how many of those links you lose. Search Engine Ranking is certainly something that's becoming more dependent upon the links to your website.

You might be forgiven for thinking that when a website no longer links back to you, that it was an accident your link was removed from the link directory. Of course accidents happen as I know from using some link manager software. Just one click in the wrong box and a website link disappears the next time you update your link directory. But the real link thieves are those people that use methods to rob you of a link.

Here's 7 Top Ways Link Thieves work and how you can avoid being their next victim.

1. If a website asks you to exchange links, don't link to them until they have given you the URL location of your link in their link directory. If you link to them first they may forget to add your link.

2. Visually inspect your link by visiting the website page your link has been placed on. In your web browser, view the source code of the page. In Internet Explorer go to View then Source and this will open up your default text editor.

Using the text editor search on the page for your website domain and ensure when you find it that the link is a standard text link of the form :
a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/" target="_blank">Link Title.

The target="_blank" just launches a new browser window when the link is clicked. The link should have no JavaScript code like: onclick="javascript:newWindow('http://www.yourdomain.com')">Link Title.

Links like this JavaScript one can be made to look visually identical when viewed in a web page browser, but to a search engine it's as if this link is not there. Whilst a visual inspection to catch this form of theft is always the best, you can catch some, but not all of these types of links by using reciprocal link manager checking software.

3. Check that your link on the other web sites page is not being put through a redirect. By hovering your mouse over the link, check what link text appears in the status bar of your web browser.

If your link appears as:
"http://www.theirdomain.com/page.html" or
"http://www.theirdomain.com/redirect.asp?id=2273" and not
"http://www.yourdomain.com"
Then your link is on a redirect.

Any form of link that has theirdomain and not yourdomain in the link URL is only of benefit to the other site owner and not you. Links like this point to their domain and not yours which gives the other site the link benefit in the eyes of the search engines.

Don't link to this site if you want some search engine benefit from the link.

If you just want traffic from visitors clicking on the link, that's the only benefit you'll get.

4. If you want to get search engine link benefit, don't link to web sites that have dynamically generated link pages. If your link is on a dynamically generated link page the URL of that page could be something like :

"http://www.theirdomain.com/links/index.php?&lk=5".

The fact that the URL has a ? or & in the URL means that most search engines will never read that page, so they will never see the link back to your site.

5. Use the Google Toolbar Page Rank Tool to check the PR of the page your link is on.

If the PR is 0 but the PR of the home page is much better, this could mean either the link directory is new ( not likely if it has a lot of links ) or there could be something about the page which is preventing Google from reaching it.

Using your web browser view the page code as in 2 above and check for the robots meta tag at the top of the page between the

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