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*A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on the quantity, quality, and the relevance of websites linking to it. Google encourage websites to exchange links while stating quite clearly that it can negatively impact your site's ranking in their search results if you use any of the following practices:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank - while clearly PageRank is a factor in our decision to exchange links our prime reason is to provide shoppers visiting CompareBuyandsave with a wide variety of shopping alternatives. Also worth remembering that links that are useful to web surfers are the type of links search engines deem the most relevant.
• Links to web spammers or bad neighbourhoods on the web - our Shopping Directory is edited manually to ensure that it only contains links to genuine websites that are of interest to UK Shoppers and that it excludes links to gambling, pornographic, or adult related websites. We also do not include links created by shady link farm systems that promise to provide hundreds of links nor will we accept links from partner pages that appear to be built exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.
• Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link - all pages in our Shopping Directory can be accessed directly from a static link on our Home page.
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.") - we ensure that we only add relevant "natural" links and limit the number on any one page to 50. Inbound "natural" links have topical relevancy and are one of the most important factors used by Google to determine the position of a website in the search results. This is one reason why we are totally flexible as to where we place a link to a website and also the area of our website that a site links to. A holiday company might for example feel that it was more appropriate to provide a link to the Holidays and Travel area of our website and in such circumstances we will provide revised text for that link.
• Make pages for users, not for search engines - pages in our site have been designed to provide a simple display of product price comparisons and provide shoppers with direct links to the online shop of their choice.
• Buying or selling links - while we feature sponsored links, this is advertising and we do not sell links to anyone.

If you require further help or advice we suggest that you go directly to Google by clicking on the following link: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356&query=link+exchange&topic=&type