Webrings - A look at an old forgotten Traffic Tool.
Webrings - an old traffic tool for future SEO?
under these definations, I like the one from Dreamstalker the best, which defines webrings as:
A WebRing is a group of similar sites that are grouped together in a circular ring and each site is linked to another by a simple navigation bar. Generally, users can navigate forwards, backwards, skipping a certain number of sites, visit sites randomly, or see a list of all the sites on the ring.
If you’re unfamiliar with webrings let me point out an example site which has a webring:
Go here for an example webring page
if you scroll down a little you’ll see a box that looks like this
This is a very common "look" of a webring. Most webrings have links for "Previous site, Next 5 sites, Random site, and next site". As well as a link to the founder of the webring.
Under this banner the author has a link for "see all the members of this webring" which leads to this page which is run by webring.com, and we can see the 33 sites that are a member of this Titanic webring (all sites having a Titanic theme behind them).
In the 90’s, webrings were in thier heyday. Search Engines weren’t that good (Remember that Yahoo ruled then, and it was a directory, it wasn’t a search engine), and webrings were a great way to find other related websites within a topic, and webrings were also a good way of gaining click through traffic as people who were interested in one site, would start clicking through the ring to find other related websites.
It’s been a few years since I’ve heard anything about webrings, but this morning I was thinking….hum…if each of my clients started a webring, and we made the code so that the links "counted"…wouldn’t this be a good SEO thing? I don’t think this would be considered spam as you’d literally be helping to create the neighborhood of your sites topic so everything would be related.
Is a webring spam?…..or genius? What benefits or pitfalls do you see?
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December 9th, 2005 at 4:24 pm
Genius! (Though I’m sure some punk would find a way to trash the concept by spamming it)
Now I just need to find a way to get on the “$1 million webpage” webring, and start cashing in!
On a completely unrelated note, you need to run a poll here asking how many people have ever bought anything as a result of SPAM or webspam.
December 9th, 2005 at 7:10 pm
Webrings - Blast from the Past
Jim Boykin has a brainstorm about resurrecting web rings for SEO link building. I’d be worried that it will come across as spam. Still, it should be worth trying as an experiment.
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December 9th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
Webrings - Can they be brought back to life?
Jim’s hit on something simple here.?
Webrings used to rule the roost for traffic.? I used to - and
really still do - love them.? There’s one problem in todays SEO
climate:? you get no link points (goes back to webrings.com or
whoever runs it)
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December 9th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
Jim,
I see the summary has cut out what I wanted to say so…
1. Google has never been against webrings in the past
2. Webrings define a neighbourhood - surely Google will like Webrings 2.0.