The Zeus Linking Program

There have been a lot of bad things said about the Zeus Linking Program, but I personally have not had a bad experience while using it. By bad experiences I mean promotion wise or loss of site traffic. I can say that my web site traffic has increased, but that could be from a number of things, I average about 2000 hits a day, sometimes less sometimes more. Every week the resource directory itself gets around 2000 visitors that come from outside of BearzWeb.Com.

I think this is pretty good considering I have not submitted or actively promoted www.bearzweb.com since 1998.

I do not actively search for link partners, I do get quite a few requests, and I turn down most of them for a number of different reasons. I do not exchange links with every web site that requests a link partnership, the web site must have information that my visitors will find useful and must also be relevant to what my web site is about. I do not link to web sites that are not being honest in their promotion of their products or services, I also check the popularity of all web sites through a number of different methods.

That could be why I have not had all of the problems that some people are putting on the Zeus program. I did have the white bar page rank for the themeindex.html page from Google but the pages within the Zeus directory had a 4 - 5 page rank, until the new web pages went live, now it is hard to tell what the page rank is. But the page rank issue was not why I wanted to exchange links in the first place, there are a number of ways around the zero page rank, but I was just too lazy to do it. My rank in Google for the main web site was great for web related search terms as well as other search engines.

I had been exchanging links long before Zeus but I did not get really into it, until one day I saw the amount of external links going to Amazon.com, over thirty million at the time, I realized with that many links Amazon.Com does not really need to promote itself through the various methods that majority of us little guys have to.

Can you image the daily traffic?!

About the same time Glenn Canady from Gorilla Web Site Marketing e-mailed me to request a link exchange and we started corresponding and discussing web promotion and he mentioned his e-book, so he sent me a copy to read through, reading his e-book just further cemented my belief that reciprocal linking did have serious promotion advantages if carried out in the correct way.

So I knew that if I wanted to seriously exchange links I would need some help to automate the process. That is how I found the Zeus Linking Program, I searched for a program that would make taking care of a directory of web sites easy as possible. For someone that is busy like myself it is really easy to keep up with an ever changing directory of web sites, the program does quite a lot to automate the process of reciprocal linking, like finding web sites, verifying links to your site from partners, sending request e-mails and more. The program can also be used for more than exchanging links, you can actually create a working web directory for any subject you can think of.

If you decide to use Zeus, you can download a free copy that works very well, but if you want to customize it to fit the look of your web site you will need to purchase it. Before you do decide to try Zeus you should get some basic reciprocal linking and web promotion knowledge under your belt first.

Because lack of knowledge about the basics of exchanging links could jeopardize your promotion efforts whether you are using Zeus or any of the many other linking programs that do the same thing.

You can check out the Zeus program here Cyber-Robotics.Com.

Third Party Link Sites
There has been a surge of web sites that you can join, sort of like a club. Where you can find suitable link partners to exchange links with, all of these sites claim to make it easier for you to find web sites that are willing to exchange links with you. I have joined many of them, but I have not had much success with the quality of the sites that want to swap links with my web site. This could also be because I do not exchange links with every web site that asks I have standards rules that I follow. If you want reciprocal linking to be a good traffic generator you must also set up some rules.

There may be others that are having great success with these sites, I may be the minority. You try them out for yourself and gather your own opinions.

Lack Of Basic Linking Knowledge
Many of these reciprocal link clubs and programs do not offer the average user real information on quality link trading strategies, and many webmasters/site owners are in the dark about effective link trading, and this will eventually kill reciprocal linking, because there are already starting to be abusers of reciprocal linking and the creation of web pages that resemble FFA pages instead of a a list of resources for visitors to visit, but as of now link trading has a large popularity. All it would take would be Google and a few other search engines degrading the importance of external links and this too would lose its popularity.

I am not saying that these link clubs and programs are purposefully promoting bad linking practices, but many do not inform people about reciprocal linking methods.

There is a right way and a wrong way to exchange links, and create pages to hold the links.

There are quite a few uninformed webmaster/site owner thinks that more links is better, that is not true. It is not the quantity so much as the quality, that is why there is a need to inform people before this gets even more out of hand.

If the creation of these link pages with hundreds even thousands of links that are a mish mash of topics continues there will be a change in how the search engines look at these types of pages. No engine or directory will want a large volume of these types of pages cluttering their data bases.

There is a very high percentage of web sites exchanging links with other web sites and not caring how much relevance the site has to their own, or if the site has any form of information to offer. This will create problems for the people participating in this type of exchanges, a web page filled with hundreds of URLS with no real theme or relevance to the main web site or the page they are on is something that you do not want to create. It will hurt the quality of your links and even your web site. I think that it would help everyone who is trying to exchange links to learn as much credible information as possible, if sites and programs are going to offer these services to others then they should offer as much information as possible to go along with it.

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