robots txt to prevent crawling of freesites

[Mr. Blue]

Unfortunately picxx you were a victim of bad advice. I'd suggest you no longer listen to the person that gave you this advice in the first place

There's a lot of bad information tossed around on boards, etc, and you really have to be careful on who you listen to. This board is a good place to post questions about LL as you won't get steered wrong as you'll be getting the info straight from the horses (owners) mouth.

[Jel]

Originally Posted by Mr. Blue

Unfortunately picxx you were a victim of bad advice. I'd suggest you no longer listen to the person that gave you this advice in the first place

There's a lot of bad information tossed around on boards, etc, and you really have to be careful on who you listen to. This board is a good place to post questions about LL as you won't get steered wrong as you'll be getting the info straight from the horses (owners) mouth.

Spot on Mr. Blue. picXX thanks for clearing that up, and removing that robots file

[Halfdeck]

I know LL owners like to get all the backlinks they can get their hands on (so would I), but you're forgetting one thing:

Duplicate content.

Getting linkbacks from supplemental pages is not going to do anyone any good.

EDIT:

Not to mention low quality backlinks from free sites aren't going to make or break your ranking on Google (though MSN probably eats them up). In a few years, who knows, Google may ignore them altogether.

One way to look at recips is advertising your LL via increasing brand awareness. Approach them as means of inflating your SE position -- and you're in violation of Google guidelines.

Preventing duplicate content is a legitimate reason for disallowing mirrors, however. A large percentage of supps under a domain may negatively impact the entire domain.

[ponygirl]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

I know LL owners like to get all the backlinks they can get their hands on (so would I), but you're forgetting one thing:

Duplicate content.

Getting linkbacks from supplemental pages is not going to do anyone any good.

EDIT:

Not to mention low quality backlinks from free sites aren't going to make or break your ranking on Google (though MSN probably eats them up). In a few years, who knows, Google may ignore them altogether.

One way to look at recips is advertising your LL via increasing brand awareness. Approach them as means of inflating your SE position -- and you're in violation of Google guidelines.

Preventing duplicate content is a legitimate reason for disallowing mirrors, however. A large percentage of supps under a domain may negatively impact the entire domain.

I admit to knowing next to nothing about SEO, but I have heard lots about dup content...so I'll just say that I don't care if there is a nofollow for that reason. I'm not going to decline submits for that if someone really thinks it helps them with SEs - maybe it does what do I know

BUT make sure your meta tags don't say anything different, that's all.

now I know this was an honest mistake but it's a good opportunity for everyone to make sure they check the little details

[Mr. Blue]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

I know LL owners like to get all the backlinks they can get their hands on (so would I), but you're forgetting one thing:

Duplicate content.

Getting linkbacks from supplemental pages is not going to do anyone any good.

EDIT:

Not to mention low quality backlinks from free sites aren't going to make or break your ranking on Google (though MSN probably eats them up). In a few years, who knows, Google may ignore them altogether.

One way to look at recips is advertising your LL via increasing brand awareness. Approach them as means of inflating your SE position -- and you're in violation of Google guidelines.

Preventing duplicate content is a legitimate reason for disallowing mirrors, however. A large percentage of supps under a domain may negatively impact the entire domain.

This is one of the reasons when I was submitting freesites regularly I'd only submit to around 12 so there wouldn't be duplicate page penalties. If however I wanted to submit to more than 12, I'd just change the page content enough to avoid the duplicate page penalty...you can keep the template the same, change the sales text, alt tags, title tags, etc, etc, etc. enough where you wouldn't get penalized for a duplicate page penalty. A little extra work, but feasibly 1 freesite can be optimized for a whole bunch of keywords depending on how many LL you're submitting to and how much you're changing the page.

[Halfdeck]

This is actually more of the point that I was interested in.

I hear you Preacher. However, META NOINDEX should solve that problem. It's also a more reliable alternative to robots.txt for keeping URLs out of Google's index.

Originally Posted by Mr. Blue

A little extra work, but feasibly 1 freesite can be optimized for a whole bunch of keywords depending on how many LL you're submitting to and how much you're changing the page.

Mr. Blue, that's as realistic a statement as saying it only takes a little extra work for LL owners to send hand-written rejection emails.

Unfortunately picxx you were a victim of bad advice. I'd suggest you no longer listen to the person that gave you this advice in the first place

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...ghlight=robots

In that thread, I wrote:

1000 incoming links are worthless if the links point to a page Google considers spam. If Google chooses an index.html with small LL linking to it over an index.html with links from penisbot, LOR, etc, then you're shit out of luck...I wouldn't leave it up to Google to decide that for me.

To customize your free sites to make them appear unique to SEs seems to be a waste of time to me.

One suggestion I saw to use robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing the duplicate content...so you'd get nice SE traffic off your primary index.html and then pull nice LL traffic off the duplicate doorways.

Personally, I'd build 1 site and submit to 20. The 20 LL will give you say 30,000 uniques over a few months and then 5,000 or whatever from SE a month.

If you spent time submitting to the other 80, lets be optimistic and say you'd get 5,000 uniques from them a month. Still, if you had to choose between 5k from google or 5k from LLs...which would you choose?

Linkster wrote:

First - Im glad to see people thinking along these lines - unfortunately you are all giving Google a heck of alot more credit that its due.
If the pages are all on one domain - yeah Google will pick one and call the rest dupes - if you dont change the pages - if you change them AND - change the inside pages for each copy of the site - then you might have a chance of getting more than one copy in Google.

as far as the robots text thingie - you are submitting free sites to a LL - if the LL bans you because of this then they are not a LL - they are trying to build a SE hub - granted we would like to get some SE benefit but it sure isnt the main reason to run a LL - or make decisions on listing someone - there are definitely much better ways for a LL to get the phrases they want in a SE - which is why after testing niche recips we went back to the single recip.

I will repeat what I have said in other threads about this - the sites you submit to LLs should NOT be the copies you are trying to get in the SEs - a site that specifically is built for the SEs will do much better and can have a few more aggressive ways of getting surfers to buy - of course thats just my way of doing things but it seems that it has worked well for a bunch of us over the years

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...ghlight=robots

Interesting thread Halfdeck... now my head is spinning.

[Halfdeck]

Seems to me most submitters aren't able to produce and submit more than a small handful of mirrors anyway.

It only takes two to tango.

Mirror sites and robots.txt disallow both lead to your LL likely getting no link juice from recips whatsoever. If you want decent backlinks, you might think about accepting only unique free sites. Even then, if you're linking to each other, chances are the link is completely ignored by Google.

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

Mirror sites and robots.txt disallow both lead to your LL likely getting no link juice from recips whatsoever. If you want decent backlinks, you might think about accepting only unique free sites. Even then, if you're linking to each other, chances are the link is completely ignored by Google.

Seems to me there's a bit of give somewhere in that statement. If that were true my LL should be worthless to google - right now it's only a notch or two above worthless.

But I see your point. In my own experiments I've noticed that backlinks from unique pages with backlinks from other unique pages gives a much higher return than backlinks from non-unique pages... well, from google at least.

[Preacher]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

...Even then, if you're linking to each other, chances are the link is completely ignored by Google.

I don't think the link is completley ignored, but I do think it becomes highly devalued.

[Mr. Blue]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

Mr. Blue, that's as realistic a statement as saying it only takes a little extra work for LL owners to send hand-written rejection emails.

That's not entirely true as if you're working on a template system it takes only a little bit more time to edit the pages for multiple LLs...hell, it doesn't really take much time to change the meta tags, sales text, and alt tags. If you run between 12 recips per freesite...if you're submitting to roughly 36 LLs...that's only 3 freesites you have to edit and optimize. It's not like submitted to tgps where you may have 2000+ pages to edit.

Now, I personally always submitted to a small LL grouping to remove the duplicate page penalty, but if there were more LLs that interested me, I would now do as I stated above.

As for whether it's good advice or not to use the robot.txt...if this is setting off people's scripts, if it's too much hassle for them to review your freesites, reviewers will do exactly do as preacher and jel did...they'll most likely not even bother reviewing or listing your sites.

So, there's a certain futility in following the robot.txt advice if it prevents you from easily getting listed at the LLs you're submitting to. As a submitter you have the options of either submitting to very few LL's (that was my choice when I was regularly submitting), Change the pages enough to avoid the duplicate page penalty (not hard to do when you're working with a template system), or use the robot.txt and not get listed on a number of sites you're submitting to.

Out of those options the most sane and easy one is to submit to a very small high quality group of linklists that you know will list you regularly.

You posted something Linkster said and maybe he can stop in and help me out on this point as I will gladly defer to his expertise in this area because I know he knows wayyyy more about this topic than I ever will. In that post you quoted, Linkster says that linksforsex went to a single recip, but a few months ago he went back to the category specific recips and that's still the case today. Now, why would a Link List switch back to category recips? As far as I can tell category recips have mainly been put in place for SEO? I'm not sure what benefit category specific recips would have other then SEO.

If LLs are using category specific recips, it seems they're doing so for SEO, if that's the case then it would behoove all involved to make google as happy as they can and take effort to remove the duplicate page penalty, but at the same time not negate the category recips that so many LL's use by using a robot.txt to block the engine from searching those pages. Essentially you are breaking a Link Lists rules because you're completely negating any benefit the Link List owner was trying to get by having category specific recips.