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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