Project Idea

[reCharge]

After some years I logged in on WebmasterSun again, as I have an idea which needs to be discussed.

As we all know, the primary problem and limiting factor for our industry is traffic.
In the past 20 years I saw an increasing monopolization of traffic while the possibilities to regain traffic via SEO, Email-Marketing, Social-Media are going down as well due more and more (community) guideline enforcing.
All and all it's a very serious development which makes the silicon valley scumbags richer while the rest of the world gets poorer.

Then I remembered myself of the early days of the internet while every website as a "Links"-Section where other websites of the same niche was linked to. This simple practice gave every participant a fair share of targeted visitors independent from a third party. Unfortunately this list needs to be maintained by hand and it could take a while till a webmaster sets, deletes or updates a link.

What if a web-project serves that particular purpose? It creates a niche relevant list (up to 5 links) for every website. These links a getting updated after a certain time, when a better matching website was found. All links will have the rel="nofollow" attribute to NOT interfere your SEO-rankings.
To embed the list into your website, javascript with .htaccess server invocation would be used (to prevent ad-blockers). The more prominent the list is placed (header, side-bar, footer) the more views take place which increases the chances of better and more views on other websites. But this is only a secondary factor, the primary factor is the niche relevancy.

What's your opinion?

 

[hipcat]

Sounds like the early days of traffic exchanges or hit lists where your ad placement determined your ranking.

I think the problem would be webmasters scared of being placed (or perceived as placed) on a link farm and hurting their overall strategy, regardless of how it may be coded.

If done correctly, and not abused or manipulated, it could be effective. Would love to see any test results!

 

[reCharge]

reCharge

I don't think that this would help in a SEO sense, as rel="nofollow" blocks the link-juice/trust-flow etc. by default.

The only noticeable advantage would be to send and receive new targeted visitors which eliminates a third party like a search engine, social media platform etc.. A noticeable drawback would be, that competitors promotes each other and some webmasters does not want to link to their competition.

If you think about a search engine, it is unable to scale as only the first 5 ranked websites receive all the traffic while all other websites listed below receive almost nothing.
Automated link-lists on the other hand, scale accordingly with the number of websites who using it.

100 => 500 spots (5 links per website)
1000 => 5000 spots (5 links per website)
...

So every link gets it's fair share of attention. To make sure, that the linklist is visible and not hidden and loaded in the background, a javascript snippet could read where the list is located and what pixel-area the browser is showing. Inline styles could prevent that the link-list gets hidden by certain css-markups.