Definitions, history, and use of webrings.
Webrings were very popular several years ago. There are two type of webrings:
1. Intrasites. An intrasite webring is designed to increase/facilitate navigation and improve traffic within pages of a site or portal.
2. Intersites. An intersite webring is designed to increase/facilitate navigation and improve traffic between sites.
The democratic idea, behind a webring, is that sites (or pages) part of the pre-patterned link structure (circular, in this case) have the same probability of being visited by a user at a given site part of the ring. This probability is 50-50, assuming one reciprocal link scheme per member (no crossed links or jumps between members).
I can think of two things that can help or hurt members of such link structures.
One is the composition of the ring. If all members are topically business related, this is a plus. Small companies, linked to large companies or competitors gain visibility and recognition among peers, which is a plus.
Another thing to consider is the link mechanism itself. If the "Next" and "Previous" mechanisms are hard coded links (statics) and are keyword optimized, this is a plus. But if the webring mechanism is dynamically generated (eg., via a javascript), chances are the link may not be crawled or followed, so no great link building benefits are derived here from the crawling standpoint.
My experience with webrings gave mixed results. Back in 2002, I taught a graduate course, with lab. I asked my students to build ecommerce applications. One was a webring.
I asked the class to create javascript-controlled webrings (dynamic). One can achieve a similar mechanism with static links. However, this has many drawbacks, especially for huge webrings. Each time someone wants in/out of the ring, it creates an administrative nightmare to the webmaster. He/she will have to hard code the pages, one by one. Because of this, a single dynamic webring mechanism sitting at the server level is recommended.
Each time someone wants in/out of the ring, the webmaster only need to remove a single link array entry from the script. This is the preferred webring mechanism, but with the above "no follow" drawback.
Last but not least, stay away from client-side scripted webrings, unless they are heavily encrypted. We know of spammers looking for link structures to eventually spam members of the ring. Also, a client-side database of links, as part of a webring, can be used by your competitors or who knows what, including business intelligence (BI). Take this kind advice from someone in the BI business.
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