Chris Brown is the Lanky Git

I want to tell you the story of how my (link) lover cheated me and only wanted me for my money (deeplinks). I did think about trying to write this in the style of a Mills & Boon novel, however I have never had the pleasure of reading one.

So we all know the score, you’ve slaved for hours coding and building and adding content to a new website. The next thing you want to do is try and get some reciprocal links, or link love as we prefer to call it.

My new niche website about ‘widget reviews’, and by a stroke of luck and careful negotiation, I manage to bag myself ‘widgets.com’. So armed with a cup of well made tea I started scouring the web for potential suitors to exchange some love with. Pretty quickly I come across a store selling widgets with a domain ‘widgetsdirect.com’. Hmm, no PR, few thousand pages in google, well structured site and its bang on the money as far as being of the same subject as my site.

“I’ll email them” I thought and see if they want to ‘get involved’. Writing emails for link exchanges isn’t the easiest thing these days, you have to try and make your email stand out from the rest of the link exchange spam they probably get. So after a carefully thought out email which contained two contact numbers for me and an outline of why I want a link, I waited. I waited 7 minutes before the guy was on the phone. This one was keen – just how I like them.

I wanted to get some decent links without causing them too much work as too put them off doing it. So I asked (maybe wrongly) just for a footer link site-wide with the anchor text ‘widgets’. In exchange I offered them hand edited deeplinks from all of my product pages to theirs, and a banner ad chucked in for good measure. After a few question regarding my ‘intentions’ with my site they agreed.

“Wahoo”, I thought. That’s a lot of links too me from a relevant site. My master plan involved renegotiation at a later date. i.e. get some deeplinks back off them, as I was confident that the way I was planning to implement their links, would not only give them some nice ‘link love’ but should generate them some sales.

After a couple of weeks of messing about with code I had implemented my partners deeplinks and also built them an admin area – to their specification’s, to allow them to login and update their own links. Just 24 hours after our first conversation my links had been added to their website too. Time to sit back and wait.

I immediately noticed that the footer link had been omitted from the homepage, a quick phone call and that was sorted. However the other party seemed a bit cagey about it at the time I just thought that they were embarrassed I had noticed a bunch of dead links in their footer.

Here we are 8 weeks into our relationship, things are going well, my ‘other half’ regularly updates and adds new deeplinks. Ahh almost maritial bliss – I am thinking should I propose…

One evening I got messing about with Google Webmaster Tools, I’ll admit I haven’t even looked at this for about a year and I am really impressed by how many new features have been added. So I add my widget site and start to scour the data it already has stored. I have a look through the ‘Pages with External Links’ report, lots of links in there of personal sites that I have added links to myself, couple of forums etc but no ‘widgetsdirect.com’. Now that’s strange, maybe G hasn’t found my link in the other site yet. I’ll wait a few more days.

I left it over a week, no sign of anything from my lover but lots more new links G has found else where, even some posted on forums 48h hours ago. Something fishy is going on!

First thing I did was view the source of the page where my link is. Looks fine, robots set to follow just looks like a normal link. Gave it a click and it opened up my site. hmmm. So the link is there but it’s not being followed, and there aren’t any no follow tags anywhere to be found.

A few more days passed, I didn’t want to ask my partner as I didn’t want to seem paranoid and insecure. So I got chatting to my brother and he ran the ‘widgetsdirect.com’ url through a web program that crawls a page like a bot a shows you ‘what a search engine bot see’s’. And this is what it saw:

http://www.widgetsdirect.com/http://www.widgets.com/

So accordingly to that little test any bots would ignore the link as it would show as a 404. Bollocks – I didn’t use this exact word but you get the idea. How? Why? I had so many questions I was confused and hurt.

Having decided I was getting code blindness looking at the same strip of code in the page source code I called on a new set of eyes, namely Happy’s. It took him a few scans but Happy spotted it…

When my link was added, my now very ex partner had omitted the ” ” from the code. i.e. it should have been

a href=”http://www.widgets.com/”

but instead

a href=http://www.widgets.com/

Bizarly I had never checked the link in anything but internet explorer, which detected the error, corrected it, firefox showed the 404. Doh!

So I am a bit pissed at this point as I have put a lot effort into our relationship and the whole thing had been a lie! After I had calmed down a bit I gave them the benefit of the doubt and emailed requesting the error be corrected and why it needed correcting. 24 hours later, no reply. One week later and still no reply. Bugger.

At the time I thought maybe they had made a genuine mistake, however just looking at how clean and organised the code is I can only assume this was done intentionally.

Despite feeling very used and very gullable, I am going to get back out there, plenty more fish in the sea and all that. Grrr.

Internet