As any knowledgeable internet marketer knows, incoming links are a very important part of your site promotion strategy. Be aware, however, that just as spammers have proliferated in an attempt to manipulate the search engines, unethical “link partners” are popping up all over the web to take advantage of unsuspecting webmasters and their eagerness to acquire incoming links at all costs.
It starts innocently enough: you are contacted by a webmaster for a site that wants to trade links with you. You do your due diligence and check the site out, and everything seems to be in order. You agree to place a link on your site in exchange for a link back. One fairly common scam occurs when the requesting webmaster links back to your site, but only long enough to get your link. At some point in the future, the webmaster removes your link without notifying you, and suddenly your link exchange has become a one-way link in his favor. Such unethical tactics require you to either periodically perform a time-consuming audit of your link partners or utilize one of the many automated software packages or online services that specialize in keeping tabs on such things.
Recently, however, I was almost victimized by a more devious strategy. I received a link exchange request from the webmaster of a site that seemed of good quality and related to my site. I replied that I would be glad to post a link back to him as soon as my link was up on his end. Within a few hours I received a confirmation email notifying me that my link was ready. I clicked on the URL, and, sure enough, there was my link. It wasn’t until I hovered my mouse over the link that I discovered that the link actually linked back to his site, not mine. In every other way, the link looked just like the html code I had provided him. The only way to know it was different was to look at the source code itself.
In short, when manually verifying the presence of a link on another site, be sure to look at the source code, not just the displayed text. It’s too easy to fake a link to your site.