Interested in automatic indie game link exchange?

[Indiepath]

Short story
- Would you be interested in getting your indie game site ranking better?
- Would you be interested getting this done automatically - so that you would not need to send a single "would you exchange links with us" email?
email me at: indiegamelink@indiepath.com

Long story
Would you - fellow indie gamers :) - have any interest in automatic link exchange? That would basically work so that Indiepath would start keeping a master list (in xml/html format) and providing tools for you to automatically update the link and generate updated page in your site. We would also start fetching more and more indie gamers to join in this link exchange program, so basically all you would need to do would be:

Example:
1. Sign up to service (give your site url, name, description et.c)
2. Put .php generator on your site
3. Put link to generated .html page to your site (link can be very tiny in some dark corner if you please - but it must be somewhere)
That would be it. We would continue gathering other indie gamers to join this list and as they do - they would automatically add your site to their list - and their site would be added to your list automatically (php generator would fetch xml data, parse it, use the style you want and generate a gamelinklist in html format).

If you are interested please email me at: indiegamelink@indiepath.com - or reply here.

If you would be interested in getting your site listed on the list but would not want to keep list updater on your site - email me about this too.

I would also appreciate if you have any comments, questions or suggestions about this system. Either via email or by commenting on this forum.

Thanks.

[Mark Fassett]

While I understand the motivation, my first thought is that I don't want anything random showing up on my site. I want control over who gets a link. The biggest reason is I don't want to be sending my visitors to a company who, perhaps, bundles adware or spyware with their games. I want to make sure the links that are on my site are links to companies with quality games.

[Jack Norton]

The idea is good- actually I was thinking to write such a php thing but you beat me on time :)
As Mark said, I'd like to have control on links: so should be possible to "validate" the submission in some way. A quick example would be a email generated with php with a link inside it that once clicked confirm the acceptance of the submitted site, that's it, nothing difficult.

If you can implement such a thing I would surely use it! :cool:

[Nexic]

I don't think I'd ever use something like this, mainly because I don't want to end up exchanging links with very low ranking, or bad quality sites. I understand how linking works, and exchanging links to a site with a much lower link popularity will hurt your own popularity.

This reminds me of various link farms. For some reason several of these think I have signed up (which I havent) and are always telling me that X Casino Site has linked to me, and I should link back. Almost always that link is on a page with a pagerank of zero, and 100s of other links, all of which are pretty much unrelated.

I'm not saying yours would be like this at all, I'm sure it wouldnt. but it's the same kind of thing. I want control over my links.

[terin]

On the bright side Nexic, page rank is almost worthless in search engines now-a-days. (almost, but not quite).

More important fact is, sounds like something a search engine could ban you for... IE: Link farming.

I say the old fashion way is better, control who you link, when, and with what text.

-Joe

[Pkeod]

I would like to exchange links with some people when my traffic is a little more valuable, but I'd like to chime with not using this because I would want to know what links I am feeding my visitors.

Though.

If you were to personally screen each link for a period of time and your program gained good trust with the community then I would really want to use it. If as long as it was not just a flood of links.

[Indiepath]

Thanks for the comments guys. Let me further describe the system:

First of all: all links would be *indie game links*. My original idea was to manually approve each link (and of course have certain criterias for links). Adware, spyware or similar is out of question. The main purpose is to have high quality sites - indie sites.

Now as you mention "I would like to manually approve each link" I think that could actually be a very good idea: when new link comes to database you both would need to accept the link before it get's listed on both of yours site. This way this would help you a lot to exchange links - if that is you want.

I don't want to argue about whether this has any use or not - that can be done in some other thread. In this thread I would like to present this system. There are two good reasons for high search engine rating:
1) Most of the browsers will look only 10 first sites (from google) after the search - so if there are affiliate portals ahead of you, you lose money.
2) If there's a crack database listed before you, you lose money.

Ok - I'm leaning into your suggestion. I'm adding: You would control the links you will display on your site. - the benefit of the system would be: You would NOT need to hunt (indie game) sites - they would come automatically to you and you could get your list updated with just simple mouse click. Compared with the "usual" method of manually sending people emails this would be much easier and faster to do.

Now - would you be interested?

[soniCron]

There was talk on another thread about turning IndieGamer into a download site. I think a marriage between the link exchange and the download site would be a natural one. Perhaps that could make both services somewhat unique. Sort of an enhanced webring.

[Indiepath]

Well... I think the major difference with this is that:

- basically indiegamer as a game download place puts focus on indiegamer - a dedicated download place that would be.
- link exchange is mutual agreement over two parties - that is: both parties can put links to their sites.

As people seem to say that they want "quality" links I think there could be fixed yearly fee for this indie game link service. Something that would keep away typical link spammers.

[Nexic]

On the bright side Nexic, page rank is almost worthless in search engines now-a-days. (almost, but not quite).


Well page rank is almost useless, but I beleive most search engines use link populartiy as one of the biggest factors. Page Rank is a measure of link populartiy, but it is heavily simplified and so does not usually give an accurate measure.

So yes, page rank doesn't mean much, but the amount of sites actually linking to you does. And of course page rank will help you get link exchanges with sites that don't like exchanging with lower PR sites.

[whisperstorm]

One thought for you -- it'd be nice for us folks who dont have access to the php servers on our hosts (basically just flat file hosting or blogger stuff) to create a javascript include we could use on our sites -- the js include is just a script tag that points to some foo.js (which is really a php file on your site) that simply document.writes the html that would show the image, links, etc...

[Indiepath]

@whiperstorm: yes that could be possible, but in the case that users can manually select which people they accept on their list it can get quite complex. I bet we can do that anyway.

[Chris Evans]

Heh, I just noticed I have a pagerank of 7. I must be doing something right. :)

But yeah, page rank doesn't seem to be such a big deal as it was a couple of years ago. It's just my luck when I get a good page rank the whole system becomes virtually worthless...