Links in signatures

[Chris L.]

Recently there has been talk about links to members web pages in their signatures. I have always allowed this and I will continue to allow members to do so as I feel it is a great way to get traffic to your site.

One thing I have noticed, some of these links in members signatures are not reciprocated. Meaning, NAFEX is not on that persons links page. This means that every time a search engine finds your link on your post ( in NAFEX) and goes and looks at your site you are getting higher ranked and I am notfrus..

Therefore, if you are going to put a link in your signature I am going to ask that you put a link to NAFEX on your site. I think this is only fair as we should be helping each other out.

If you do not wish to link back to NAFEX I understand but please be sure to take down your link in your signature.

For those of you who have already put NAFEX on your links page I really appreciate it, thank you

if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask

[areal]

Chris Sorry for not replying to your PM before, I'm afraid with the builders here since last week I've been proper snowed under.
Your thread above pretty much says the same thing I would have said in any reply, if anything I'm surprised you've let people get away with non-reciprocal links in their signatures for so long.

For those who dont understand how search engines and link popularity work, lets just say if you run a website of your own, I would advise you to put a reciprocal link back to Nafex and then make responsible use of that piece of advertising real estate that is your signature field.
It may not generate as much traffic as a pay per click campaign, but $or£ spent, you'll get better long term returns from the signature field.

Moving forward, it might be worth starting to get smart about how people link to Nafex (or for that matter to their own websites)
For those who are not familliar with linking websites, the point of doing so is so that the search engines see our sites as effectively "endorsing" the content on the other site. The search engines are machines (or rather machine programs) which can read lots of information, but cant really make a whole lot of sense our of what they see. To make sense or rather give context to the content they read, they rely on the number of times words are repeated, (keywords) and among other things, the number of links pointed from other sites to that website.

You could sit down and write the be-all and end-all falconry manual, put it on the net and it will rank pretty much zero until you start asking the search engines to index your site. There are lots of ways to get them to index your site but the two main ones are by submitting the site manually to a search engine or by allowing the search engine to "find" your site itself through links from other websites.
In practice submitting your site to the search engines does work, but if you built two identical sites, submitted one directly to the search engines and let the other be "found" through links from an already indexed site, the "found" site will list sooner and rank better than the one you told the search engine about. (identical pages!!!)
So links is the way you want to go, but now again take two identical sites (both selling unicorn shoes, we'll call them unicornshoes.com and smartunicornshoes.com)
Now unicornshoes.com gets everyone to put a link with the text www.unicornshoes.com on their links pages.
Smartunicornshoes.com does the same thing, but the ask the linking sites to use the text "Unicorn shoes" or Unicorn Shoe specialist" or "Unicorn Shoes for sale" in their link test.
Now when people search, Unicornshoes.com will come up if someone put www.unicornshoes.com into the search engine, but very few other keywords would return their page. This is not a problem if everyone on the web already knows what your website is called, they wouldnt even need to use the search engines, but if we go back to smartunicornshoes.com, their page gets return by the search engines when someone is searching for "unicorns", "shoes" or "unicorn specialists".
No-one needs me to tell them which site will attract more traffic from the search engines.

So what we come down to is good links and not so useful links (you can also do bad links but I'm not going to teach how to do those, use your imagination if you have ill purposes in mind!!)
The majority of links will almost certainly be www.nafex.net links, which are good, but the same link could be made better by using keywords that Chris would like to target the search engines with.
e.g http://www.nafex.net is an okay link, but
North American Falconers Exchange or Falconry Discussion Forum point to the same place, but give better keyword exposure.

Chris, for the benefit of those who have added links to the forum, it might be useful if you could publish the list of keywords youre hoping to target search engines with.
For my part I'll gladly do a full affiliate page from my website, but I'm not going to be presumtious enough to assume I know which keywords youre targetting.

[Chris L.]

Chris Sorry for not replying to your PM before, I'm afraid with the builders here since last week I've been proper snowed under.
Your thread above pretty much says the same thing I would have said in any reply, if anything I'm surprised you've let people get away with non-reciprocal links in their signatures for so long.

Evan,
No problem man.. Thank you very much for the great post. I was trying to say what you did , but you did a way better job of explaining it to the others thank you.

I never really thought about the reciprocation until i started checking on others' sites on here and they did not have NAFEX listed but they had other falconry sites listed.. not sure why????

Chris, for the benefit of those who have added links to the forum, it might be useful if you could publish the list of keywords youre hoping to target search engines with.
For my part I'll gladly do a full affiliate page from my website, but I'm not going to be presumtious enough to assume I know which keywords youre targetting.

Great idea,
I think it would be great to post a code that they can just cut and paste in their site.

thank you for making a affiliate page, i really appreciate it.

Some key words: ( the top 4 being my most important)
falconry forum, forums
raptor breeding
falconry classifieds
red-tail,
harris hawk
peregrine
falcon
gloves,
jesses
(hell man anything falconry to get a search here)

thank you again for the great post

[areal]

thank you for making a affiliate page, i really appreciate it.

Tell you what I'll do, when I have a few minutes I'll knock the page together and then post the links in a code tag on here so people can copy them for their own use.

[areal]

I think its important to give Chris credit for the valuable real estate he's making available to users who maintain their own website/s here.
When I put my profit head on I'd be inclined to advise him to only let paying members use links in their signatures, but at the same time that creates a nightmare for his mod team to police. (no more than policing reciprocal links but at least his team gets to look at other sites with this system)

If you have a website of your own, particularly another falconry site, I would advise you to take Chris up on the offer to use your signature to promote your site because it WILL improve your site's rankings more than you can possibly imagine.
At the same time you have a number of ways of being creative with how you do the links back to Nafex.
The following examples create keyword optimized links back to various parts of Nafex (relevant to the section youre pointing at)

<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=16">Longwing Falconry Discussion Forum</a>
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=18">Shortwing Falconry Discussion Forum</a>
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=17">Broadwing Falconry Discussion Forum</a>
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=44">Eagle Falconry Discussion Forum</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=38">Imprint Falconry Discussion Forum</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=22">Food Management Falconry Discussion</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=24">Raptop Breeding Forum</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=23">Raptor Health Issues and Treatment</a> 
<a href="http://www.nafex.net/forumdisplay.php?f=40">Falconry Federal/State regulation links, information and forms</a>
<a href="http://www.nafex.net"<img src="http://www.nafex.net//pics/nafex-header.gif" border="0" alt="North American Falconers Exchange-Falconry Forums" /></a>

The last example will display the Nafex logo on your site with optimized keywords in the alt tag. (If people would like the banner in different sizes I'm sure Chris would be happy to help you by publishing the banner in a few standard sizes.

The main thing is have fun while youre linking back to your favourite forum. If there's a thread you've really enjoyed following on here, then link directly to it from your site/blog. Dont just stick to the same olf nafex.net links, get creative and our bloggers for instance could with the help of just a few well chosen keywords improve the search engine ranking for this site, while giving themselves something to twitter, chatter, bebo or facebook about.

[wesleyc6]

For some reason the banner that was originally put up is very hard to see on my site.

[Chris L.]

Evan,

thanks man. I appreciate you taking the time to do that.

[Chris L.]

For some reason the banner that was originally put up is very hard to see on my site.

Wes

i bet because I took that old one down.. just a guess


that new code evan posted will work great, if you want to use that

thanks for putting NAFEX up on your site

[Chris L.]

I will give everyone until the end of the week to comply . After that, I will start to go through and remove the links in peoples signatures.

Again, if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask

Thanks


Chris

[areal]

I will give everyone until the end of the week to comply . After that, I will start to go through and remove the links in peoples signatures.
Again, if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask
Thanks
Chris

Chris I dont mean to contradict what you've just said but could I suggest the following as a potential time saving/work reduction option.
Its going to take a good 2 - 3 weeks for the search engines to pickup links being placed on less busy sites.
Give users say 2 - 3 weeks and then just go onto google, type link:www.nafex.net in the search field and it will give you a list of the sites it has detected with inbound links. (At present its found 12 sites, lets see if we can triple that before Chris starts checking on us.)
Then just go through the memberlist and pick out the ones that dont have a link pointing to you.
Saves a load of manual digging and checking each site in a signature link.

PS Isobael.... Very nice Blog young lady, and so far to top links go to wakayamatakagari!! Good linking guys!!

[Chris L.]

Evan,
sounds great to me. I think you have more savvy about this type of stuff than I do.

thanks for the help with it

[areal]

Evan,
sounds great to me. I think you have more savvy about this type of stuff than I do.

thanks for the help with it

More than happy to help Chris.
As for being more savvy, not so sure my wife agrees. She shows me a website she likes and I right click and start looking at its source code before I comment on it. Really annoys her for some reason. I just cant help doing it

[Isobael]

PS Isobael.... Very nice Blog young lady, and so far to top links go to wakayamatakagari!! Good linking guys!!

Thanks. Hehehe. =)

I think Nafex, Dragonhoods, and The Modern Apprentice were the three original links on my blog and have been there since I started the blog.

I never knew about the reciprocating links. It was just automatic to put Nafex in the links since I spent so much time harassing the forum. LOL.

[outhawkn]

I will give everyone until the end of the week to comply . After that, I will start to go through and remove the links in peoples signatures.



Chris

One of the things most of the nafex members have always enjoyed is the "family" atmosphere of nafex.But now, its beginning to look a lot like business. Just something to think about Chris.

[touyang]

Chris I dont mean to contradict what you've just said but could I suggest the following as a potential time saving/work reduction option.
Its going to take a good 2 - 3 weeks for the search engines to pickup links being placed on less busy sites.
Give users say 2 - 3 weeks and then just go onto google, type link:www.nafex.net in the search field and it will give you a list of the sites it has detected with inbound links. (At present its found 12 sites, lets see if we can triple that before Chris starts checking on us.)
Then just go through the memberlist and pick out the ones that dont have a link pointing to you.
Saves a load of manual digging and checking each site in a signature link.

PS Isobael.... Very nice Blog young lady, and so far to top links go to wakayamatakagari!! Good linking guys!!

Evan,

Not sure how accurate the search results are. I had linked to NAFEX since my site first went up over a year now and my site didn't show up on the list.

Tou

[Chris L.]

One of the things most of the nafex members have always enjoyed is the "family" atmosphere of nafex.But now, its beginning to look a lot like business. Just something to think about Chris.

Bill,

I don't like being taken advantage of. Bottom line. It becomes buisness when you promote your buisness on my forum. I am not charging for this, where other forums don't allow it unless you pay.

Family is great, but I can't support everyone on my dime and time, while others make money off of me. I think by me still allowing it for free is pretty family friendly, but comments such as yours make me wonder why I do allow it.
All I am asking is to scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

[areal]

Evan,

Not sure how accurate the search results are. I had linked to NAFEX since my site first went up over a year now and my site didn't show up on the list.

Tou

PMSL, They are accurate, its just there's something about your links menu on your site that Google doesnt like.
If you do a site: search on your modern falconer site, google indexes 23 pages, but your links page is not indexed so none of the links on that page get indexed.
I can look into your site in more detail if you want but you could probably solve the problem yourself by adding a Sitemap page with links to every page on your site.
Sorry but if the search engine doesnt see the whole of your site then it wont index the whole of the site, even if a human can quite easily find the link on your site.
Have you tried using a search engine simulator to see what the search engines are able to see on each of your pages. There's a free one at http://www.webconfs.com/search-engin...-simulator.php see if that's any help to you.

[areal]

All I am asking is to scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

Its a relief to see you explain this in such a mild tone, I dont know if I could have managed as much myself.
The simple fact is the running of the forum is a very serious business with very real implications for the people involved.
I recall early on when I first joined I raised this issue with you (I think I still have an old PM reply from yourself on the topic) you were happy for us to put up links.
Over time more and more users have started linking to their other websites and as Bill rightly points out this creates a good sharing/family type environment.
Your problem is you are responsible for the links people put up. Family/Open environment it may be, but if I went and put up a link to the nastiest Belgian porn site out there or Ben Hiding's latest terrorist Howto manual, you would be responsible for it. It'd be your door the Homeland security or pron cops come knocking on first.
As you rightly say, other sites charge for this privilege, but the down side there, You live in USA, I may be a Belgian Pedo or a Jihadi nutcase with a site to promote, I pay you/theforum $50 and now you're under contract to provide me with a service that's legal in my country but seriously illegal in your country.

Reciprocal links with no obligation on Nafex to tolerate an offensive link of any kind, to me seems a good compromise between a total free for all (that's impossible to police) or total lockdown(in which no-one benefits).
It specifically doesnt commercialise the placement of links, if anything I'd say it fosters even more of a family/comunity spirit by allowing us to share our websites with others and help promote everyone's sites in the process.
As long as you keep your shirt on, I dont mind if my twitching fingers serve to scratch your itching back. Dont do other blokes skin

[Takasho]

so far to top links go to wakayamatakagari!!

That's me, wahoo! I don't know what I did or how I did it but...wahoo!!

[outhawkn]

Its a relief to see you explain this in such a mild tone, I dont know if I could have managed as much myself.
The simple fact is the running of the forum is a very serious business with very real implications for the people involved.
I recall early on when I first joined I raised this issue with you (I think I still have an old PM reply from yourself on the topic) you were happy for us to put up links.
Over time more and more users have started linking to their other websites and as Bill rightly points out this creates a good sharing/family type environment.
Your problem is you are responsible for the links people put up. Family/Open environment it may be, but if I went and put up a link to the nastiest Belgian porn site out there or Ben Hiding's latest terrorist Howto manual, you would be responsible for it. It'd be your door the Homeland security or pron cops come knocking on first.
As you rightly say, other sites charge for this privilege, but the down side there, You live in USA, I may be a Belgian Pedo or a Jihadi nutcase with a site to promote, I pay you/theforum $50 and now you're under contract to provide me with a service that's legal in my country but seriously illegal in your country.

Reciprocal links with no obligation on Nafex to tolerate an offensive link of any kind, to me seems a good compromise between a total free for all (that's impossible to police) or total lockdown(in which no-one benefits).
It specifically doesnt commercialise the placement of links, if anything I'd say it fosters even more of a family/comunity spirit by allowing us to share our websites with others and help promote everyone's sites in the process.
As long as you keep your shirt on, I dont mind if my twitching fingers serve to scratch your itching back. Dont do other blokes skin

Had you been here a year ago you would have seen a different kind of thinking....................I guess all things change.

[outhawkn]

Bill,

I don't like being taken advantage of. Bottom line. It becomes buisness when you promote your buisness on my forum. I am not charging for this, where other forums don't allow it unless you pay.

Family is great, but I can't support everyone on my dime and time, while others make money off of me. I think by me still allowing it for free is pretty family friendly, but comments such as yours make me wonder why I do allow it.
All I am asking is to scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

I remember when I and many others tried to get you to mlet us help you with expenses. You kept saying no, all you wanted was for falconers to have a place to come to and exchange ideas. Then you allowed us to help, big or little whatever we could afford. My comment was just to make sure you had given some thought to both sides of the coin...........

[killjoy]

Chris,
If i may ask, what expenses do the forum?
I only ask cause the AP board is free, but NAFEX and the IFF both seem to rely on donations.
I wouldnt mind investing into something i use, but as an investor your self, may i have a prospectus(sp) as what my donation would be used for?

if it is private, no problem, i respect that also.

[FalconryFriends]

I think it's a great idea Chris. Fair exchange is no robbery and like you say ... we get hits from your site. Changed my link to your site and used some of the keywords you suggested. I had no idea that would make a difference ... Thanks for that info Areal ...

Mina

[bgibson]

chris , i appreciate you and this site. i don't give a tinker's damn what you do with the donations. i'm sure they are a helluva lot less than what you've donated. keep swirlin' bro...... Baressi style!

[FalconryFriends]

Just testing this ...

[tescobedo]

Chris,

Please tell me you haven't used donations for an embroidered, NAFEX merkin

[Zarafia]

Chris,

Please tell me you haven't used donations for an embroidered, NAFEX merkin

ROTFPMSL

[Takasho]

an embroidered, NAFEX merkin

More NAFEX gear coming??

[tescobedo]

More NAFEX gear coming??

Please don't give him any ideas!

[Dirthawking]

Chris,

Please tell me you haven't used donations for an embroidered, NAFEX merkin

That would be Krys!!

Please don't give him any ideas!

Don't give Krys any more ideas!

[tescobedo]

That would be Krys!!



Don't give Krys any more ideas!

Don't be so quick to dismiss Chris L.

[Dirthawking]

Don't be so quick to dismiss Chris L.

Yes but Krys would actually order it. Of course I do not want to know if he would use it. Might be funny at the next TOD event!

[wesleyc6]

Don't be so quick to dismiss Chris L.

Somehow I have this awful image of Chris in a latex suit with crocs, trying to court an imprint gos. I am seeking help for it

[KidK]

Thanks Chris for this forum and all you do to keep it rolling!

http://www.mhcwebsite.macwebsitebuil...ge/5877478.htm

[Chris L.]

chris , i appreciate you and this site. i don't give a tinker's damn what you do with the donations. i'm sure they are a helluva lot less than what you've donated. keep swirlin' bro...... Baressi style!

Ben,

thanks man. I appreciate it. Its like Butchy is all over this thread !!

The doantions go to help take a little bit of the sting out of the cost to run NAFEX. I appreciate those who do help and people like yourself who give their time and talents to make NAFEX a better place, thank you.

If people think I am making money off this site they really have no idea what it costs to maintain and to run. This is not a free site and is far from it. It works for Ap falconry but not for me. Lets just say with cost of the server, software and man hours maintaining and updating the site it is more than I feel comfortable talking about. People have no Idea what I am doing while they are posting and having a great time.

The crazy part to me is.. all this has been brought up because I asked for people to put me in their links section if they are going to promote their site.. gotta love falconers. Always look a gift horse in the mouth .

I think it's a great idea Chris. Fair exchange is no robbery and like you say ... we get hits from your site. Changed my link to your site and used some of the keywords you suggested. I had no idea that would make a difference ... Thanks for that info Areal ...

Mina

Mina, thank you I appreciate you doctoring up your links, it will help for sure..

Chris,

Please tell me you haven't used donations for an embroidered, NAFEX merkin

More NAFEX gear coming??

Somehow I have this awful image of Chris in a latex suit with crocs, trying to court an imprint gos. I am seeking help for it

LOL , you guys aint right !!!!, Bad visuals, put that in the bad place for sure!!! I just may have to get one now... I hear they are making a come back .