Troubleshooters.Com presents:
The Troubleshooters.Com® Link Exchange Policy
Copyright © 1996-1999, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2014 by Steve Litt, legal
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 the late 2000's, my policy was to trade links with basically any family friendly website, no questions asked. It was a time of webmasters helping each other, and somehow that never lasts, because opportunists move in to make their quick little killing, poisoning the water for all. By 2008, well over 95% of all link exchange requests received by Troubleshooters.Com were pure span. Dealing with these worthless links would have consumed too much time. So now, Troubleshooters.Com's default action on a link exchange request is to ignore it. But...
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 the rules stated on 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! No time for spammers. Our default action on link exchange requests is /dev/null, the bit bucket, the garbage can. If you want your request to be one of the few that are perhaps considered for inclusion on our links page, here are some factors that make it more likely that your request will get our attention:
If you've made your request personal, easy to respond to, relevent, and family friendly, I just might trade links with you.
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 visitors are successful and highly educated (don't take my word for it, look us up on Alexa.)
If you'd like an incoming link from this type of high quality site, and are willing to spend five minutes applying this page's rules to your request, then it's worth it. Otherwise, it's not.
Tens or even hundreds of emails per month come in from people or computer programs claiming they have placed or will place a link to a Troubleshooters.Com page on a page of their website. Sounds great, right?
The trouble is, the page containing their link to you has nothing but links, and they're all unrelated. 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. Simple: stupid SEO tricks 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.
Today, most link requests are spam form letters asking me to use specific phrasing, agree to legal language, and all sorts of other things against Troubleshooters.Com policies. Time wasters. They're instantly deleted.
I built Troubleshooters.Com 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.