Promoting Your Site Through Web Rings

What's a web ring, you may be asking, after reading the title of this article. A web ring is a group of sites dedicated to the same topic. Topics may be general (higher education, for example) or very specific (Smithtown High School, Class of 1989, for example). These sites link to one another in a fashion that makes a ring (ie. site a links to b, site b links to site c, and site c links back to site a). This enables visitors to easily navigate several sites of like content.

Rings may be independent (a group of sites forming a ring without a structure organized by an outside party), but more often than not they are run by a place like WebRings.com. Places like this host a plethora of rings, organized nicely into a directory by topic. The web ring host handles code provision for the ring sites. Generally the ring member who started the ring serves as "Ring Master". The ring master's job is to approve sites into the ring and regularly check to ensure that sites member sites are still online and displaying the ring code. Downed sites or sites without code "break" the ring (ie. site a links to site b, site b links to site c, site c is down and visitors can't move on to complete the ring back at site a).

Web ring code is usually created in a dynamic language such as Java script. This means that, if your site is in a web ring, your link still does not appear directly on other ring member's sites; rather, the dynamic ring code does. Because of this, search engines will not generally "count" web ring links as incoming links to your site. Your partaking in these rings will not effect your search engine rankings.

What does occur as a result of web ring presence is an influx of visitors who are interested in the ring topic. So, while you won't get bonus traffic from search engines, you will see a traffic increase thanks to your ring membership.