Direct Link Or Redirect

Just something for you guys to watch out for when you are busy building backlinks to your websites.

There are a lot of media where you can easily submit your backlinks. With forums and blogs and RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites all around us

As a webmaster you are are that a lot of these sites have opted to use the no follow attribute in the links pointing out of their pages, i.e. your backlinks, to reduce the amount of spam and probably to keep as much of their PR juice on their pages as possible

But the disadvantage of this is these sites that use the no follow attribute in links do this at the risk of reducing the volume of comments they get, in the case of blogs or participation in the case of forums.

And we all know that user participation is a significant part of generating fresh content and also retaining a loyal following

But some webmasters have another way around this.
They leave the do follow attribute on the links so you think that you are getting juicy do follow backlinks to your sites when you participate in these sites.

You can easily find what links are do follow and which are not using the tips I outlined on a previous post on how to find do follow links

But these webmasters convert all links to a redirects. So instead of the link pointing to your domain dot com. It points to their domain/ your domain dot com

This link has no SEO benefit for you!!!

So when you are going around the web, dropping those useful bits of information on blogs and participating actively in forums, just make sure that the link in your signature which may have a do follow attribute is actually linking directly to your site

How can you do this?

Status Bar

In the tool bar of your browser, click on view. In the drop down menu, the status bar should have a tick to the left of it. If it doesn't click on it. This will bring up a status bar at the bottom of your browser. When you hover your mouse over any link on the page, it will show the exact URL the link is pointing to in the status bar

Copy URL Location

The other option is to right click on the link and copy link location. Paste it on a notepad document to see exactly what URL the link is pointing to.

Have fun building those links