Thinking of Joining a WebRing on "Yahoo!"? Think Again!

The original purpose of web rings was to connect web sites with similar interests. Such connection promises a particular site to get more exposure on the Internet as well as more related interested visitors. The truth, however, is that not only the number of the visitors does not increase, but also the site becomes slow to load, unattractive, and overall unprofessional.

First of all, a page containing the yahoo nav bar takes longer to load because it makes a call to functions located on yahoo web site, which, in turn, access the database to retrieve the needed information and then display it. Not only the retrieval of this info is time consuming. If your site is a member of many rings, just to display all of them on a page takes time. All this in addition to your own content. So, a visitor clearly has to wait for a long time to see your page. Half of the visitors will filter out right there, even before your site is loaded.

Now, assume the other half of visitors - the patient ones get to see the site. Besides the sites content, these visitors will see a huge block of brightly colored rectangles - web rings. With yahoo nav bar, all the rings are displayed as one large block making them indistinguishable. The visitors at best will not pay attention to this block at all. Or they will realize that this block is ugly enough to qualify your site as unprofessional and even not trustworthy. By this time, you will loose half of the remaining visitors.

Consider yourself a visitor to a site displaying a list of webrings in the yahoo format. Are you going to browse through the block of these rectangles and click on "next site"? How many "next" sites do you think you will be willing to go through? Remember that all these sites take long time to load, or keep the webrings block on a special Links/Webrings page, which is difficult to find on a site and is slow loading. Most visitors would not follow this path at all. Thus, your site is not sending any visitors to the other ring members. Similarly, none of the other members in the ring sends visitors to your web site.

Therefore, adding a yahoo webring nav bar does not increase number of visitors on your site. Moreover, it makes your site slow, unattractive and unprofessional. Think carefully before joining a web ring on yahoo.