Now-a-days, most WebMaster's understand the importance of trading links with other sites. Afterall, besides the obvious logic of "The more roads to the site - the more visitors" - trading links has great Search Engine Ranking benefits. Which have been proven many times before, so I will skip going into any long "Statistics prove...." talk. (If you want more info see our good friend Google [1].)
Anyway, so what is the title all about? Well... me being over-zealous in my link trading. ;)
Back when LearnPHPFree.com was only a couple months old I found a site called Photoshop Freaks [2]. I liked there content and so I searched the site trying to find someone's email... hmmm.... well, maybe over here.........nope. Ok, well, lets try google! So I CTRL+Copy'ed "Photoshop Freaks" (yep, I'm not to big on typing...) into google along with a couple other terms like "email" and tried some other things. After six sets of the famous "470,000 results in .32 seconds", I gave up. So lets try the less-used "whois" search. Now, for those of you who don't know - a whois [3] looks up the data about the owner of a domain name - which in this case was PhotoshopFreaks[DOT]com.
So I checked out a couple of sites and I found the details of the email...hmmm.. and a phone - cool! So why wait for an email when you can call them?
"Hey, ummm... you don't know me but my name is David and I would like to trade links with your site PhotoshopFreaks.com."
Uh, Ya... how would you feel to have someone YOU DIDN'T KNOW call you up and ask that? Well, needless to say, he wasn't to excited about someone calling to ask about trading a link. (Now that I look back I kind of feel embarrassed) However, I still got it and you can see it on the left side of the page [4].
But this provoked two thoughts:
First I discovered the importance of "Private Domain Registration [5]".
For antiquated reasons, ICANN rules require that whois data, the data that describes the owner of a domain (like pcmag.com) and the contact information for that owner, be valid. This database has become a feeding ground for spam harvesting and outright stalking. - PCmag [6]
hehehe... I am a link trading stalker. :P
I know where you live register...
The other thought belonged to Mr. Thomas [7]. lol.
So learn the lesson of protecting your privacy.
(or you might get a call from me one day...)