RoadTrucker's Link Policy

Dear Webmaster,
The following is RoadTrucker's Link Policy.  Our link partners are important to us. Linking for people is also important to us. More important than the search engines. Consequently we have chosen to ignore some of the (what we feel to be) excessive promotion of link exchanging. We want our links to be of value to our link partners and their links to be valuable to us. We have set the following Link Policy guidelines for ourselves when choosing link partners.

1. They must be US companies or have a dominant US customer base. We are a US based company who only ships to US addresses. It does not do us any good to have a link from a website who only serves another country. It is also a waist of time for their customers.

2. They must have a clear link to their link partners page on their home page, just as we do. What good are links if no one can find them?

3. Their links must be clear and easily readable, so that their customers, if interested might choose to click on their link partners links. Again, what good are links if no one can read them.

4. We strongly prefer links in the Trucking industry, but will accept good quality links from other industries.

5. You should not have more than 40 links to the page. Very few people will read down a page with hundreds of links on them. Our pages are limited to 15 or 20.

6. No pop-ups, pop-unders or any other (what we feel are obnoxious) content that the website visitor has not requested. We do not want to send our customers to a website to have un-requested content shoved in their face. We will remove any links that our customers complain about.

7. We will NOT link with website using the following (what we feel are unethical) Link Policy tactics.

a. Placing their partner's links on a domain other then theirs. For example, we have noticed a few websites who place their partners links on Link Manger's website.

b. Having no links to their partners link pages.

c. Using the robots.txt file or the robots meta-tag to block search engine access to their partner's link pages.

d. Placing their partner's link pages deep into their Navigation structure.

e. Linking to their own page, then using redirects to go to their link partner's page.

As stated, we have chosen to ignore the "get as many links as possible" strategy, in favor of limiting our links to quality links in our industry that a customer might actually click on. The interesting thing here, is we have less links per page than most of the other sites we link with, yet we have a Google PR=5. Our total links are about 50 or so which clearly indicates the "link at all cost" philosophy has a few holes in it.

We have seen many webmasters make linking choices that were not equally favorable to them and their link partners, sometimes actually making their links one sided. Consequently, we do check our external links. We search Google for each of our link partners that do not show up in our logs and if after a reasonable amount of time they do not show up with our link in Google, we remove them. Especially if we see their home page increase in rank, but their link page remains pr=0. The net is a difficult place to do business on, but it does become easier when you support and are supported by legitimate and ethical businesses.

Best Regards,
Tina Rowland
Product Manager
RoadTrucker