is this seen as a one way link?

Hi guys, as a part of my link building ventures, I'm working on getting blogs relevant to my niche to put a link to my website in their sidebar, typically on the blogroll. I have a pretty good success rate(all it takes is feigning interest in their blog), so i've been getting a bunch of site wide links from blogs with 1000+ unique posts apiece. Unfortunately, a couple want me to put a link to their site on mine in exchange, which I've been doing as a no follow. The links i've been getting are do follow, so my question is, if i add their link to my site as a nofollow link, will google see the links from their site to mine as one way, or does google realize that there is an exchange of links?

Google can still index nofollow links. I would venture that the links will be viewed as exchanges.

Micallef said:

Google can still index nofollow links. I would venture that the links will be viewed as exchanges.

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I think you are right. That will count as link exchange and not as a one-way link.

is there anyway to have the link, but not have it seen by search engines? I don't mind the fact that the link is there, but i'd like the extra juice of a few thousand one way link versus the exchange ones.

Yeah even if the links are still no follow, google still recognizes it as a link..It just doesn't give you PR juice.

I believe Google will definitely look at it as an exchange.

It is possible to hide stuff from search-engines, and still show it to your real visitors - Google uses specific IP-ranges for their bots, and they usually send out a unique User Agent. But it's a risky game to play - if google finds out (and they most likely will), there might be consequences.

If I were you, I would try and offer them a link on another website of yours. If you don't have one, just create one - fill it with content (PLR articles, scraped content, autoblog, whatever), give it a decent design, and make it look like it's recieving traffic.

is there anyway i can use a robots.txt file to tell google not to crawl the section of my page where the link is?

I am not sure robots.txt would be enough, but I could be wrong.

This website explains how to use robots.txt:

peter2002 said:

I think you are right. That will count as link exchange and not as a one-way link.

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Which means, Google doesn't give much importance to no-follow links right??

Well IMHO, we need to build some no-follow links as well, only then google thinks that the links are building naturally and gives value to the links. . Hope you guys got my point. .

Thanks

google still follows the links even if they're set for no follow. The only difference is they don't add any weight (or very little depending who you listen to) to the indexing or pagerank of your site. So I don't think there's any doubt that it would appear to be a link exchange. There's really nothing wrong with doing some link exchanges as long as you don't have so many as to appear as a link farm.

The way your doing it probably isn't having the effect you're hoping for, and at the same time you devalued the return link you promised. But there is a better way to do link exchanges with more chance of them seeming to be one-way links.

The best way to do it is have multiple sites. You get a backlink from the other webmaster pointing to your site, and then put a backlink to his page from one of your other sites. You can leave as do follow so both of you get good one-way links to each other.

If you already have any link silos then you could use them. If not then it wouldn't be a bad idea to build a few anyway.

I think that being one site removed would be enough even if that site is a silo pointing to your page also, but on the chance that google would pay attention to that, you could even make the return links on a site that isn't directly pointing to yours at all. It would be a waste to make a site and build backlinks to it if you aren't also using the site yourself, but if you have multiple projects already then using a silo unrelated to the site your exchanging links with would probably be the best way to do it.

If you don't have any silos, and don't have any other projects then this could be a good reason to start one or the other.

Google looks at all links pionting to your site and likes to see a natural structure and variety of links. All types of links are worth having just mix them up and keep them fresh, above all else keep it looking natural and find a couple of really good high PR bcklinks they will really make a difference.

professorcrey said:

is there anyway i can use a robots.txt file to tell google not to crawl the section of my page where the link is?

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I can be done by changing the meta keyword for robot as "no follow".

amndalb said:

I can be done by changing the meta keyword for robot as "no follow".

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Google will still follow a link even if it is set as no follow. No follow is only intended to let google know not to give the link any weight.

If you wanted to do it this way you would actually need to set the page as no index, no follow. Even then there's no gaurantee.

The best way would be to do as my previous reply and a few other people's replies suggest. Make a second site to use for linking out to the other site.

how do link exchanges work with serps. aren't they not really valuable

Would it suffice if I sent the exchanges to a subdomain of the site I'm linking to, should it be an entirely new website?

mrseotools said:

how do link exchanges work with serps. aren't they not really valuable

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That's why the OP is trying to figure a way to do the link exchange without the links showing up as a link exchange.

professorcrey said:

Would it suffice if I sent the exchanges to a subdomain of the site I'm linking to, should it be an entirely new website?

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I don't know if a subdomain would really work to hide the link exchange. I would think a completely seperate website would be better.