Links, Redirects and Self Promotion

Classifieds1000 FAQ

Links, Redirects and Self Promotion

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Because our forums are primarily designed to develop a community with vigorous social discourse on a topic, to entertain and inform our members, our rules for linking are much different than some other forums.

Dec 2010 UPDATE! Because of a large volume of abuse, ie: people making irrelevant, uninteresting, short, useless posts just to link to their home pages we are phasing in a new system for linking. These are the basic details:

• You cannot link to your own page
• You cannot put urls, links, etc in your message text (this has always been the case, but they will now be removed automatically and/or manually)
• You CAN use our forums for self-promotion, and do so more effectively than on most forums.

Before you think about self promotion or linking to your website, think about community, think about participation. Think about sharing information, stories, ideas, questions and just about everything you can think about other than some kind of promotion for yourself. Think about how highly people will consider your skills and abilities from your posts in our forum. Think about people feeling like you are a friend and/or guru after reading your posts. Think about any link you include with your posting taking someone to a truly useful website on the topic of your post (but not your own). Now go and post in our forum along those lines.

But wait, what about my links and self promotion?

That part is really easy and fun too. On the top menu click "community" and then click "add new site". This will allow you to build a mini-web site within our community. You must first participate in the forum! Your mini-site can contain link(s) to your own websites or elsewhere. You mini site can be a single page or multiple pages.

Once your mini-site is complete, not only will it be indexed by the search engines, but a link will automatically be included with all your forum posts (past and future) so our members can easily refer to it. You must participate in our forum at least once a week for the links to remain. The links will be present whenever you have participated at least once in the past week. The mini-site will remain whether you continue to participate or not, but the effectiveness will be much diminished.

Your mini-site can also include photos and other media such as maps, and videos are coming soon.

We do encourage self promotion on our forums! However, we have special guidelines to ensure that it is both effective for you and interesting and informative for our members. Please review our article specifically about using our forums for self promotion.

In general these are the basic rules for including links with your post. Remember, all links on our sites are "do follow".

• A maximum of 1 link is allowed on a forum post/reply
• The link must be directly relevant to the topic of the post/reply.
• The link must go directly to the destination page, ie: no redirects
• The link must go to a page that all users can read, ie: no pages requiring logins
• The link must go to a comprehensive page, not something superficial, ie: posting a classified ad with a link to another site with the same ad.
• The link and Anchor text (Title) must be placed in the forum boxes for that, not within the text of your message.
• Only registered users can post links and the link must not be to their own page.

A maximum of 1 link is allowed on a forum post/reply

When posting a new message or a reply, there are two lines provided for a link. The URL, ie: http:// and a title for the link. This will appear below your message. It is not a signature line, but a link.

The link must be directly relevant to the topic of the post/reply.

Remember, each of our forums as a specific topic. Additionally, each message within the forum has a topic. Any link included with a message must also fit within both the topic of the forum and the topic of the message.

The link must go directly to the destination page, ie: no redirects

That means no shortened urls.There is no practical limit on the length of a URL you can use, so there is no need to "shorten" or disguise it.

That means no affiliate links. We have no objection to users participating in affiliate programs and encourage it. However, you should participate from your website, not ours. For example, with clickbank, you cannot link directly to clickbank (that would then redirect to a vendor page). Instead you should link directly to your website, which can certainly have links for clickbank or other affiliate programs.

The link must go to a page that all users can read, ie: no pages requiring logins

Some websites, for example, Facebook, or the Wall Street Journal, request users to register and login to view some content. We do not allow links to pages that require a login for users to view the information.

That doesn't mean you can't link to a page that has free and/or paid membership. It means you can't link to a page that requires a user to long in view the substantive information on it.

We've disabled all links to facebook, because we have no viable method to determine which pages require a user to be logged in or now.

The link must go to a comprehensive page, not something superficial, ie: posting a classified ad with a link to another site with the same ad.

Basically, this means don't link to ebay (information disappears rapidly), craigslist, again the listings disappear and we find most links to craigslist end up being links to the same content that was posted on our site.

No one wants to follow a link to get the same information they just finished reading!

The link and Anchor text (Title) must be placed in the forum boxes for that, not within the text of your message.

URL's that are placed within the message text, aside from not showing as links, may be removed, cause the message and/or user to be deleted. Links placed within the text box will be removed by a automatic and/or manual process. We may also block them from being used in any manner on our websites.

Only registered users can post links

This is pretty self explanatory! Reread the previous section about putting URLs within messages.

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