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Originally Posted by Joobz
Couldn't you just use Alexa or Google to get the link-to information for free? Help me out if I'm too off-base  |
Yes you can. I would not particularly use Alexa though, I am not sure where they are getting their information from. Yahoo would be a good place to find links at now too.
Arelis basicly aids you in this process, it is a tool. They have a database that will record the results and categorize them. Plus it comes with other database features so that you can record other info like the email address of the contact, notes about the site, yada, yada.
The guidelines for writing for a link exchange request by Arelis is very good, and with the paid version -- it will send the mail for you. You can build your own link page templates in Arelis also -- and name the pages, set up categories, etc.
Zeus, I think, has a stigma attached to it. That stigma comes from the abuse of the system by other webmasters. It is not uncommon to come across a site with a notice attached to it stating that they will not link to any site using Zeus.
Also there are a number of site owners who are experiencing drops in PR on these 'theme' pages from the last update. But other link pages (non-Zeus) have been taking some hits as well.
Zeus is so automated that it is way too easy to crank out a hundred or so pages and recieve links from sites that you should really ought not to be linking too. Arelis to some extent will do this too. It is all in the hands of the operator. Personally, I do not like linking to any sites using any linking software at all and prefer the home-made pages one click and no more than two-clicks off of the Home Page....and only after I have done a review of the site to see who they are linking to.
I have some pages (hand generated) that are taking dings now. So I do not think it is so much the software used to generate the pages either. Some of my link partners pages are getting dinged, and these are not machine manufactured pages for the most part.
In my opinion -- I think the days of the link exchange pages might be gone to some extent. There will be more value placed on natural linking, for instance -- a link inside a body of content that references your site in the context of that text around it....or your link in the byline of an article.
Links in the footer pages of a site, or links in near the end of the body (such as the ones to the right of this post labled Webmaster Resources) will always be valuable links. In fact, if you take a look at this site (Webmaster-Talk) and analyze its linking, you will see that they have a network of comparable sites that are interlinked together in a very natural fashion. All the sites involved are benefitting from this relationship for they are related to each other, and at times are often in competition with each other. It is a very good example of natural linking in my opinion.
I have three sites that I am working on (well several really...hehehe) and on those three, none of them will have link pages. So far, I have built one of these sites up to a PR5 without the use of link exchange pages and that was done in under three months time -- I have more links going out than you can shake a stick at on one of them. So try to figure that one out, eh?
