I'm providing a modified version of LinkEx for free that will help turn some of your shitty trades into good ones and assist in helping you eliminate link farm trades.
This script will increase the strength of the PR passed to your site and at the same time allow you to use the max outbound link feature without penalizing sites with a ton of links.
Read through, the link to download the script is towards the bottom.
We ALL KNOW that the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page. This is no secret, and
exchanging links with a site with 500 to 1,000 outbound links is just crazy, but everyone seems to do it. The problem is the PR being sent to the site you traded links with is shared with those 500 to 1000 sites.
This makes your link trade almost USELESS.
Many smart / experienced webmasters use the rel="nofollow" command on their JUNK links (affiliate links, FHG links, toplist links, comment links, etc). By using this command you can eliminate LEAKING PR to shitty links and only give PR to links you value (i.e.: your hardlink trades, links to your own sites, etc).
However it is surprising how many webmasters are not still not using this powerful tool Google has provided them even though it was available years ago. Having people use rel="nofollow" on junk links makes a shitty trade that passes little or no PR into an excellent trade which ends up passing a good chunk of PR!
LinkEx has a feature that limits the number of Max Outbound Links, HOWEVER if you set that feature to something reasonable (say 100, 200 or even 300 outbound links) you will severely limit yourself to who you can exchange links with.
We've come up with a solution!
We have added a feature in LinkEx which will now IGNORE counting links using rel="nofollow" in the count when checking the Max Outbound Links! (this will not affect the existing option to prevent them to from using rel="nofollow on the link to your site)
In your Admin area under "
Settings"---> "
Link Verification Settings" set the number of Max outbound links to whatever you want. Below that you will see the NEW option "
Don't count nofollow" (see cap below underlined in red)
If someone tries to exchange links with you and they have over the number of Max. Outbound Links you have set on their reciprocal page, they will receive the error shown below in the following screen cap:
When they click the "CLICK HERE" link, it will bring them to
this page (in a new window) which will explain to them how to change their links by adding rel="nofollow"
You may also want to add to your Rules something along the following:
NOTE: MAX OUTBOUND LINKS on your Reciprocal URL noted below
DOES NOT COUNT 'junk' links using
rel="nofollow"
I guarantee you will probably lose many trades by using the max outbound links setting even with using this modified script to ignore the rel="nofollow", HOWEVER, anyone who knows about SEO will tell you it is better to have 20 quality links than 50 shitty ones. More PR will be passed to you by 20 sites with low outbound links vs. 50 sites each with 800+ outbound links.
After upgrading, I would recommend emailing your current LinkEx traders before enforcing this new option and give them a week before suspending their accounts and at least another week beyond that before deleting their links. (You don't want to piss people off). If you have never used the max outbound link feature, once you have given the people you trade with notice, you may want to start out with allowing an extremely high number of outbound links (say 400-500 for the first month and see what affect it has, then adjust accordingly down to the 100's or 200's).
To download this modified script, click here
(scroll to the bottom of the page and click the download link.. the info at that url is pretty much identical to what I have put in this thread)
To upgrade your existing version of LinkEx, simply upload the index.php file over the old version!
(When new versions of LinkEx are released, I will provide an update within a week of it's release at the url above)
I have also included an optional blacklist of the most aggressive spammers and cheaters.
If you use this modded script, have questions or comments about it, let me know in this thread thread. ;)