Troubleshooters.Com Linking Policy

Webmasters: If you want a reciprocal link from Troubleshooters.Com, read this entire page and follow its instructions exactly.

From Troubleshooters.Com's birth in June 1996 until May 2005, my policy was to trade links with basically any family friendly website, no questions asked. I dropped that policy because an influx of link trade spam hawking worthless links consumed too much time.

From May 2005 until May 2008, our default action was to accept incoming links if they followed certain guidelines, to inform the other webmaster if the request didn't match the guidelines.

Because of the deluge of spam link requests during the last several years, as of May 26, 2008, our new default action is to ignore incoming link requests, and send them to our spam learner, where they can frolic with mortgage email, male enhancement email, Canadian medicine email, sex email, Betty Banks email, "I'm tired tonight" email,  and bank email warning you of a security breach and to go to http://script-kiddie.vx and change your password.

I might, at my sole discression, respond to a link trade email if I think it's written by a real person, and if it conforms to this page. As a starting point, start the letter with "Hi Steve" or "Dear Steve" or just "Steve". Anyone, even on a dialup line, could spend three minutes and learn that the guy who runs Troubleshooters.Com is named Steve. What do you call a request for help from one unwilling to spend three minutes of research? Spam!

I'm mad as hell about spammers forcing me to change my policy like this. Link trades were how Troubleshooters.Com grew from maybe 10 visits per day in June 1996 to 100 visits per day in February 1997 to 3000 daily visits in 2001. Because of lazy wannabe "businessmen" wanting a shortcut to web traffic, and the spammers who support them, Troubleshooters.Com's accomplishment would be impossible today. Until now I've tried to help newer webmasters the way the established mid 1990's webmasters helped me.

But now, with the tens of link trade spam per day, trying to help would significantly reduce the time I spend making money and feeding my family.

The new policy: 5/26/2008

We will not respond to requests for link trades! Instead we will place link trade request in our spam learners to train our spam detection to automatically killfile link trade requests.

We might, in special cases, respond to link trade requests. These special cases will most likely respond to requests that don't waste our time or require us to educate the requester, and who get it right the first time. Here are some factors that make it more likely that your request will get our attention:
  1. Address me by name. "Hi Steve", or "Hello Steve", or "Dear Steve", or "Steve", or anything similar. This is the single most differentiator between spam and a personal request by a human.
  2. Link to Troubleshooters.Com first. We have no time to police reciprocal compliance.
  3. Put the link to us where it's easy to find for someone seeking what the Troubleshooters.Com page has to offer, not on one of many link pages bearing no relationship to the T.C page to which they're linking.
  4. Wait for the link to be visible. That means upload and then wait a day or two.
  5. Email me, starting with "Dear Steve" or "Hi Steve" or something else to distinquish you from a form letter. The email should tell me:
    1. The page containing the link, and the text of the link so I can find it quickly on that page.
    2. Exactly how to navigate from your main page to your T.C link. List in order all links clicked.
    3. The Troubleshooters.Com page to which the link points.
    4. Your preference as to which of your pages Troubleshooters.Com should link back to, if we decide to link back.
    5. Your promise that your site:
      1. Does not contain content, or link to sites with content advocating hate, violence, weapons of mass destruction, disrespect toward groups of people, fraudulant material, illegal activities including but not limited to unauthorized copying of copyrighted material, or sites displaying pornography.
      2. Does not involve excessive popup ads, huge load times, or other problems so obnoxious as to be disturbing to Troubleshooters.Com visitors.
      3. Does not mount Troubleshooters.Com in a "sticky frame".
      4. Does not mount Troubleshooters.Com in a new window or tab and then fail to switch focus to that new window or tab.
      5. Does not require our accepting any sort of legal agreement, explicitly or implicitly.
      6. Does not request specific wording for the link text. It should be too obvious to state, but I'll state it -- I will not take the time necessary to verify whether your site's products are "low priced, "lowest priced", "high quality", or any similar claim.
  6. Respect my time.
  7. Do not ask me to accept any sort of legal agreement, explicitly or implicitly. Unless you're paying me $10,000.00, it's not worth my hiring a lawyer, and I certainly wouldn't agree to your legalese without one. So don't ask!
  8. Refer to Troubleshooters.Com as "Troubleshooters.Com". I've spent a lot of time and money obtaining trademarks for Troubleshooters.Com, and want that name respected.
If you've made your request personal, easy to respond to, relevent, and family friendly, I just might trade links with you.

Is it worth all this bother?


I've given you a lot of hoops to jump through, just for the chance of being considered for a Troubleshooters.Com link trade. Is it worth it?

Not unless you need visitors like those visiting Troubleshooters.Com. Troubleshooters.Com gets approximately 6500 distinct IP visitors daily (May 2008). Our Google visibility on 5/26/2008 is as follows:

Search
term
 Placement on
first page
troubleshooting
 #3
"process of troubleshooting"
 #1
"troubleshooting process"
 #1
"troubleshooting cars"
 #1
"automotive troubleshooting"
 #1
"troubleshooting Linux"
 #11
"regular expressions" Perl
 #1
"Perl regex"#1
"Ruby tutorial"#1
"socket programming"#5
"pool maintenance"#6
"normalization"#11
"overheating"#1

If you'd like an incoming link from this type of high quality site, it's worth it. Otherwise, it's not.

What we mean by "worthless links"(link-spam)

2005 brought a new trend. I now receive tens or even hundreds of emails per month from people or computer programs putting placing a link to a Troubleshooters.Com page on a page of their website. Sounds great, right?

The trouble is, the page contains primarily links, and is one of over 50 such pages, with similar titles, containing primarily links. For instance, somebody places a link to a Troubleshooters.Com Linux oriented page on their page titled "Toyota Radiators", right alongside a religous link, a car link, and a construction link. NOBODY will find the link to the Troubleshooters.Com Linux page, and if they did, they would not be looking for Linux content.

You might wonder why anyone would bother to put together a website consisting of little but disorganized links. I don't know, but I suspect it's to fool Google into thinking they're very popular and being linked to by numerous other websites.

Then there are those "taker" webmasters wanting traffic from incoming links, but unwilling to relinquish the reader. They use sticky frames that put the linked to site inside a frame of their own site, so the visitor gets only a partial view of the linked site. Or they display the linked site in another window or tab, but keep focus on their own window so all but the most observant visitor never visits the linked site. Such webmasters are selfish on a kindergarten level, and their useless links will not be reciprocated.

Around 2007-2008, most link requests became form letters asking me to use specific phrasing, agree to legal language, and all sorts of other things against Troubleshooters.Com policies and wasting my time. It's just not worth it any longer.

I built Troubleshooters.Com to a 6500 distinct IP visit per day site, over a period of years, by including valuable local content, publicizing it, and drawing links. It appears some modern webmasters (or more likely those companies guaranteeing a great search engine placement for a price) want to do it quick and cheap. If so, they will not have the assistance of Troubleshooters.Com.

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