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Webrings – A look at an old forgotten Traffic Tool.

Webrings – an old traffic tool for future SEO?

Google defines webrings

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

webring.gif

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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9 Responses

  1. 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.

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  4. 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.

  5. SHHHHHHH!

    I would say it is a good thing, just be smart about how you structure it. Maybe set up a webring directory/tool which allows users to easily create their own webring…

    brought to you by ringninja!

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