Believe it or not, these leftovers from Web 1.0 are still popular on some websites. The idea behind a web ring is that sites are connected in random order to form a ring back to the original site. The webmaster gets a small piece of code that displays the sites, sometimes randomly, in the same ring. Usually, you have the option to click on one or more sites at the bottom on a web page to continue surfing on a related topic, interest or business objective. The web ring forms a “collaborative” group of sites.
Typically, since links rotate, or are displayed in random order, it is very hard to detect if any links are broken. It would take a lot of work on the part of the webmaster to check all the links.
Web Ring History
The web ring was born in 1994/5, created by Sage Weil, and is said to have died in 2001 under Yahoo’s reign. Ringmasters, the people who maintain and organize web rings, became more and more relegated to the background as “Web 2.0” emerged. Unfortunately, web rings were being associated with loud banner ads, annoying graphics, blinking text and horrible font colours. Read the whole story here.
Popular Web Rings
The most popular web rings are grouped by topic so you can “surf” after starting from one of these sites:
Search your favourite topic and explore web rings starting from these two sites:
Hebrew web ring site from Israel:
More history and interesting facts about web rings:
Web Rings of the Future
It seems that web rings have an uncertain future. After 2001, there was a huge boom (after the bust) in the commercialization of the web. As corporate web presence grew, the homespun web got less and less popular. Web rings faded unless you were a Ringmaster with a strong community following. Corporations are a little less likely to bring a collaborative spirit to reignite the web ring concept. Lately – it’s all about keeping eyeballs on your site and converting them to sales, not surfing on a Sunday afternoon.
Link Exchange Scripts
Separated at birth, link exchange scripts are related to web rings. Link exchange programs have became very popular since the rise of web scripting languages. Many of link exchange scripts became fully automated which was a great time saver and greeted with enthusiasm. However, these automatic scripts cause many issues as well because webmasters forget to look after them.
Despite the fact that some link exchange scripts have the ability to “check the links”, these scripts are often abused by spammers because the webmasters are not as worried about them. Bad links get submitted daily as a result, ruining the user experience.
One of the first link exchange companies, LinkExchange, brought a little bit of “real-world” advertising to the warm, fuzzy world of Internet information sharing. LinkExchange was touted as a site that had an incredible reach to consumers looking for things and resources in a specific niche. Advertising on the site brought legitimacy as an ecommerce website. It also brought more eyeballs to whatever you were promoting – very powerful audience numbers before social networking came along.
Social Networking, Bookmarking Gadgets, Widgets and Scripts – oh my!
These methods have become the easiest way to share links when compared to other mentioned in this article. However, so may webmasters miss this aspect (isn’t StumbleUpon.com just a random web ring after all?) Despite that, URLs may look real in the browser but many of them are generated using JavaScript; this makes some links invisible or some of them broken to web robots like GoogleBot. The software mentioned above should not be avoided, but we’d like to emphasize that scripts and software usually cause linking troubles.
What should you do to be safe? “Nofollow” everything you find suspicious on your site. If social bookmarking has a specific URL, you can hide that from robots using robots.txt. Also, always check your site using LinkAider, our reporting module will provide the reports you need to fix broken or bad links.
