Link Scam Or Not?

[Daedalus]

I was recently approached by a new SEO company for a reciprocal link trade. They proposed putting my website’s link on a page that is 3 clicks (or sub-pages) away from the homepage.

The first click away from the homepage has no text outside of the text that is inside the 8 links to sub-pages.

The second click has no text outside of two links called, Links1 and Links2.

The third click has a handful of links to SEO companies.

I’d like some opinions as to whether Google, Yahoo! and MSN will go three sub-pages deep and actually find the SEO company links that are 3 clicks away from the homepage?

Link scam or not?

[Nick W]

Scam?

That word is getting overused. If you even suspect someone is "scamming" you i'd suggest you didnt do business with them.

Useless possibly, stupid maybe but a scam? rather unlikely imo but then "due dillegence" is somthing you should practice so if you feel that something is wrong with the situation, investigate

[sugarrae]

I wouldn't say scam. I'd probably be more inclined to say "worthless link" - of course, without seeing the page, I'm guessing based on limited information.

[I, Brian]

Let's see if I'm reading this right -

- the links have anchor text, are not redirected or otherwise hidden by a script of blocked robots.txt, and are present and visible on the page -

- but -

- you feel that some descriptive text is required to accompany the link to validate it?

Did I read that properly??

[Daedalus]

Yes, let me clarify a bit. All of the subpages presently have a PR0 which may or may not change with the next Google update.

In order for the 3rd sub-page to be found, the robot has to travel from the homepage to sub-page A, B, and C in that order.

The second sub-page only has two words on it, Links1 and Links2 which link to sub-page 3. I'm doubtful as to whether Google will index this page since it has almost no content on it.

What I am wondering is if this company, knowingly or not is setting up a situation where they are gathering lots of inbound links from reciprocal trades, but burying their link partners' links so deep that they SE's won't find them and thus giving themselves a nice pop in the rankings while giving their partners nothing.

I've seen something similar with a website that uses a CMS with non-search engine friendly URL's and perpetual PR0 on all of their link partner pages. When I asked them about this they said they were supplying traffic and not PR and would not rewrite their URL's.

Anyway, there are lots of ways to get without giving when it comes to link trades and I'm just wondering if this is another method to do this, that's all.

[chrisharris]

Hello Daedalus,

From what i can see your link partner is not involved in any type of wrong doing, he is just setting up a directory structure and the links naturally go deep into the site,

Regarding the sub page having only 2 words saying links and linking to the inner page doesnt look like a problem to me, Search engines dont feel them as any sort of duplicate pages, SEs are known to index 100 of pages with 95% similiar contents,

Search engines are known to crawl more than 10 levels deeper depending on the quality of the site and the quality of the inbound links to that site, If you feel it is really worth exchanging reciprocal links to him you can always do that,

[I, Brian]

It sounds as if the company is using a PR "choke", by removing the link exchange pages a level below what would normally be required. The links would be available for spidering, but their value is certainly lessened.