I have written in an article about the importance to be linked by other web site in order to increase your link popularity. It is related to PageRank. The more back link you get, the higher your PageRank will be, and the higher ranking you will get in the search engine when somebody searches your keywords. You may easily found many of webmasters really eager to exchange links with each other especially when the other page's PageRank is higher then them. Just type "link exchange" in Google you will found thousands of them. But you must be very careful in choosing web site to exchange link. Some of them just make your PageRank going down into the drain by wasting your PageRank.
Firstly, what is PageRank? PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. When one page links to another page, actually it is telling the search engine the importance of other page. When more links a page got from another page, it shows how important the page must be.

While surfing around looking for web sites to exchange link I found some of webmasters doing bad thing to their link partner. One example is to add the directory where those links are located in disallow line in "robots.txt".

What exactly the webmaster want to do? Actually, the webmaster restrict any search engine's robot from crawling into the directory, in this case 'linkbuilder' directory. If you have exchange link with this web site, the spider will not see your link on the page, so it contribute nothing to you PageRank. Obviously, your web page has a link to this web site (because you exchange link with him) and the spider see it. Your web page give a point to the web site, but the website give nothing to yours. As a result the PR of the web site will increase, but your web site's PageRank will go down.

Another way of link exchange's scam is to make your link hidden from search engines' spiders. The link can be hidden by putting it inside javascript, redirect it to a php or asp process page, instead of plain 'a href' HTML code. Using CSS (cascading style sheets) also can trick your eye, which make link appear to be correct, but in fact it is redirected to another way around before it go to your web site.

Meta Tag also can be use by selfish web masters to hide link. Actually it is not hide link, but instruct the search engines' spiders to ignore any link on the page. So the spiders will not consider the link as a point of importance of other page. The meta tag use for this action is "nofollow".

As a way of precaution to increase your link popularity (and PageRank) by link exchange is you have to make sure:

1. The directory which the link is located is not restricted to any spider (robot). On the web browser's address bar type http://www.websitetocheck.com/robots.txt. Check the restricted directory.

2. Always check the source code, make sure the link is directly pointing to your web site by 'a href='http://www.yourwebsite.com'

3. Check those links in weekly or monthly basis, if the link which is pointing to your web site is missing, delete their link on your web site.

4. Check the meta tag of the page and try to find ' meta name="robots" content="nofollow" '


About the Author
Azani is the developer of http://www.pc24hours.net and http://www.ccautosoft.com