Link List SEO / Seppuku

[Useless]

Originally Posted by oldbrad

I'm definately no seo guru, but it seems like if nothing else it might increase the trust google has in your site without "artificial" links or recips. At first it may suffer, but compare it with all the competition that uses recips and maybe it would get a boost.

The beauty of it is, I'd have no way of knowing if it was suffering or not. New lists take so long to build traffic, that it's difficult to point at any one thing and say that's why I'm not getting SE traffic or that's why I am getting SE trafic. One of my many fears is that if it does prove to be a dud, everyone will point, laugh and say what an idiot I was to even consider it.

Originally Posted by SheepGuy

The idea about filtering traffic between those surfers looking for galleries, FS, or AVS, though, wouldn't work well for me. The only thing worse than that would be if you named the AVS I was using, which a lot of LL's I don't submit to do.

My primary concern about filtering between the links types was basically the same as yours. I was thinking, who's going to screw with free sites or AVS sites if they can go straight to the galleries? Being that I don't do galleries, I'd be screwing myself and my free site building colleagues. I do tend to enjoy seeing everything mixed together.

Originally Posted by tigermom

I think it's a good idea, the only problem with these complicated link exchanges is trust. I'm not sure how you can work with a trust system with a large number of people at once.

I've never been much for link exchanges. I sort of like having my sites being as independent as possible, so when the day comes that I finally have the BIG breakdown and delete everything off of the server and spend my days in a padded cell, few people will be affected. Of course, not being a link swapper has probably been the biggest detriment to my business over the years. Google must think that I have very few friends. And simply trusting people to reciprocate from some unknown location would probably be a mistake. I think that group of trusted linkers/submitters/contributers would always remain small.

I'm also not sure how many people I'd feel comfortable with directly manipulating the content on main site pages, but I do like the idea of having niche specific blog posts from multiple authors running down the category pages. Normally, I wouldn't expect someone to create content for another's site, but if all the affiliate links were their own, and the author's tagline linked to her/his own site, then I'm thinking a few people would be willing to do it.

There's really a lot to think about here. I spent a lot of time last night just sitting here staring at the main page of the site trying to imagine how everything would work and look.