Is there a way to hide and outgoing links page to the general public, but still have the person you are linking with have access? I have noticed some sites do not contain any type of links page with outgoing links, but when I do a backlink check, they seem to have a lot of links. (edited) I am new to this, so any help is greatly appreciated.

Hi jedidr, welcome to the forums. There are plenty of ways to "hide" outgoing links pages. The most common way is to simply not link to it from an obvious location, such as a "resources" or "links" link in one of the navigation areas. However, when you see inbound links, that shouldn't mean there is a corresponding outbound link. You are talking about reciprocal linking only. It is probably better to have more inbounds than outbounds, in most cases.

I would recommend reading the sticky thread by Nacho titled "Link Building 101 (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2616)" as well as some of the other threads in the Linking Section, and you will begin to understand the differences/benefits/pitfalls associated with various types of linking initiatives.

Good luck!

Thanks Chris. I do understand the difference. But how do you handle a site that wants an outbound from you, yet don't want the link to be seen? If you look at the sitee i posted (removed: actual site unnecessary for discussion), you don't see any outbound links. Yet, backlink tracing shows a number of sites that have had a reciprocal relationship with this site. That is what I am trying to set up. I know some of this is paid linking, but some of it is reciprocal, yet I am not sure from where.

jedidr, you are missing the whole point of linking: to link to/from relevant and useful content. You are focusing too much on search engines and not enough on users. If I was to enter into a reciprocal linking arrangement with someone, I would demand a clear path from the home page to the link to my site.

Chris- I understand your point and I agree. I am wondering how a site like I mentioned has so many links, yet shows nothing on their own site. I assume most of it is paid inclusion. My next thought is that they seem to show up on quite a few RSS directoriesl. What is the thought on that? I am trying to do seo as ethically as possible, don't want to be shady about any of it.

probably just a links page that they don't link to from anything? Or they could hide the links in any number of ways, or they could have removed their links page recently?

Not showing a links page which you've used to get inbound links is defnately 'shady'. Personally I don't like them but if you want to exchange links in a not very well thought out manner (which is the reason for having a links page imho) then thats fine, but to get a link from another site on the basis of linking back, and then to deliberately remove the benefit of that link back (with a unindexed links page, by using nofollow or by otherwise fudging the links) is plain rude.

I confess I've sometimes just deleted links pages from clients sites so I might be causing confusion like this to someone, somewhere, but imho if you can't work the link into the content of your site as a genuine resource then you probably should just go spend some money on buying links or creating good content/linkbait. That's never 'shady', although it might be discounted under the 'paid for links' clause which seems to have been invoked now :)

I am wondering how a site like I mentioned has so many links, yet shows nothing on their own site.
Is the site you're referring to any good? A high-quality web site is likely to have tons of inbound links, regardless of whether it reciprocates those links.

Could be three way linking, I was looking at a couple of sites that recently tanked and they had loads of obviously recip links but no links pages on their sites.

Could be three way linking, I was looking at a couple of sites that recently tanked and they had loads of obviously recip links but no links pages on their sites.
did you use some sort of crawler like Xenu to confirm that there were no pages with outbounds? Also, three way linking still requires outbounds from somewhere...unless you are packing all the outbounds on one site I guess...

*did you use some sort of crawler like Xenu to confirm that there were no pages with outbounds?*

Didn't go that far, just looked in the more obvious areas and checked their indexed pages; what made it particularly noticeable was both had fairly prominent link exchange forms.....

the site i am talking about 90210dentist.net is ranked top 5 in just about every keyword i search for cosmetic dentistry. The back links show about 200 links, of which some are definitely sites that require reciprocal linking. I happn to know the owner, and it is possible he simply deleted the page.