Which links should you accept?

This is always a tricky question and basically, there's no one answer.

Many people like to only accept links from link pages that are cached in Google. It proves that Google can get to the page and that it's worth having the link. But what about on a new links page, even a new website? It's quite possible that the page won't be on Google yet, but will be in a few days or weeks, maybe even a couple of months. And if you refuse the link because it's not on a cached page and then in a few months the site owner has worked hard at link building and the page has a good page rank, then you have missed out.

So the fact that a page is not cached does not mean don't accept it. But what you can do is to accept the link for now and then review it in a few weeks or months. If then it's still not cached, ask the website owner why and tell them you want the link moving (but make sure first that your own link back page is cached - don't fall for that trick). If they don't answer, or don't comply, then it might be best to remove the link.

There are a load of other tricks that website owners can use to hide links from search engines. I am not suggesting you use any of these - just letting you know how people hide links to avoid being caught. If you do start using these tricks, once other people find out you will use all of your links in.

But why would people be using such devious tricks? Well, it's well supported that one way links are far better than reciprocal links. Some people try this by 3-way linking, more about what I think about that later! So by hiding your outgoing links from the search engines, the search engines will think you don't have pages of outgoing links and that all incoming links are one way. Your link popularity shoots up and those linking to you get no benefit back.

Most people don't notice and this continues. Then at some point the search engines notice this false oneway linking and see that you are hiding content. This can result in being banned from the search engines!