Exchanging links. What to look for.

You have a website and you are interested in getting or exchanging as many links as possible. But before you put a new link on your page you should also analyze it.

Spotting banned websites

Yes, a website can be banned by search engines for spam or other illegal activities. This means that it will not appear in their search results and that any other website linking to it will be penalized. However, most of the time a website may not appear on Google just because it is new. You can also check to see how old the website is with a whois or archive.org. If the website is over an year old and didn't manage to get indexed by Google it's suspicious.

A search engine friendly link

If you are not just looking for traffic from link exchanges then you should check the link to your site. Verify the HTML code. You should not see any meta tag that prevents robots from crawling it. Then check the link itself. If it points to another file instead of directly pointing to your URL, then crawlers won't give it any importance. Furthermore, some webmasters put a rel="nofollow" attribute within the anchor tag. This won't have any visible effect but it won't give you any credit for SEO either. It was originally created to stop spamming from text submitted by visitors. It is used mostly on guestbooks and message boards.

Example of a redirect script

Example of a link hidden from search engines