Arts and Crafts Relevant linking
Relevant linking is a derivative of reciprocal linking in which a site linked
to another site contains only content compatible and relevant to the linked
site. Relevant linking has become increasingly important because most major
search engines stress that -- in Google's words -- "quantity, quality, and
relevance of links count towards your rating."
The engines' insistence on reciprocal links being relevant developed because
many of the methods described below -- free-for-all linking, link doping,
incestuous linking, over linking, multi-way linking -- and other schemes were
designed to unethically "fool" search-engines into awarding undeservedly high
page ranks and/or return positions to sites engaged in search-engine spamming.
Though the engines warned site developers (again quoting from Google)
to avoid "'free-for-all' links, link popularity schemes, or submitting
your site to thousands of search engines (because) these are typically
useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the
major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider
to be positive they also took proactive steps to recognize linking schemes and
down rate or de-index sites using them.
This, in turn, led to the development of search-engine compliant
link-management systems enabling webmasters to benefit from the upside
of reciprocal linking without putting themselves and their sites at risk
from inadvertently straying over into the dark side.
Since many linking schemes -- particularly those involving some form
of link farming or free-for-all linking -- were (and still are) based on
variations of a 1999 patent for an automated system of gathering links and adding them to a
website without the possibility of editorial direction or intervention,
development of a solution based on a polar opposite approach became
highly desirable.
In 2006, after six years of evaluating the company's application and
its underlying editor-based technology for acquiring and managing links,
the U.S. Patent Office awarded Creative Net Ventures of Atlanta patent
#7,082,470 for its Links Manager application.
To date, the Links Manager system remains the only proprietary,
patented, semi-automatic link-exchange enabler to comply with all major
search-engine quality guidelines and Web best practices standards
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