When I first discovered LinkWorth, I thought, well this is just another one of these text link advertising companies trying to copy what others already successfully do. I know all the big brands from their advertisements everywhere and you probably have seen them also.

So why did I give them a try? Out of curiosity and to see if it would work for my websites. If you try to make money online and linkworth combines several ways to earn from your site: Text link advertising with or without a description, paid posts like this one, linked words in your content, and for your search engine marketing they help with article directory and directory submission services.

The company is new, but they have a lot of ideas they implement faster than I can keep reading about it all. As a publisher you have the choice between two payment schemes, either the standard partner option where revenue is split 70/30, or you become a preferred partner, get only a 50/50 share but LinkWorth puts some more effort in selling your ad space.

One of the huge advantages is that you as publisher set the price for ads o your page. We all want to earn from our websites, at least get the cost for domain and hosting back, and the space on you site is limited .

What I like:
- I have control of what is displayed on my site.
- Support is quick with answers to my questions.
- I can set my own price.
- Low minimum payout: 25 US$

What I don’t like:
- LinkInText is too much work right now. You have to add every individual page by filling in a form. Can you imagine doing that for hundreds of pages, me not. Support told me they work on a better solution, but so far I decided to wait until this is in place.
- The control panel is a bit confusing.

What is the robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a simple text file you can write with any text editor, that tells search engines and other bots where not to go on your website. This can be i.e pages with program files that have no value for search engines indexing your site, pages that are still under construction or your log files.

A recently implemented use of robots.txt file is also to tell search engines where you store your sitemap file by adding a line like this:
Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Unfortunately it is also a good source for hackers to gain information about files and folders on your web server. Robots.txt is in not to keep files hidden. For this you would need to use a .htaccess file on your server or other techniques.

What does a robots.txt look like?
These three lines would keep out all robots that obey the rules out of the temp folder:
# Exclude all robots from temp folder
User-agent: *
Disallow: /temp/
Line 1 is a comment line, # starts a comment. This line is optional.
Line 2 lists the robots for which the next line’s command is valid: A wildcard (*) here means all robots.
Line 3 specifies the file or folder you want to exclude. If you just write Disallow: , you allow everything. Be careful here. Don't forget to add a file or folder name.

There is a command 'Allow' exists but it is not supported by all robots, so better play it safe and use 'Disallow' even if it is more work.

For a folder you write
Disallow: /foldername/

for a file use
Disallow: /filename.html

Only one folder or file per line is allowed. If you want to exclude several folders, use one line per folder/file.

If you only want to exclude a certain robot, use it’s name instead of the wild card (*):
User-agent: Robotname
Disallow: /temp/

Where to place the robots.txt?
The robots.txt has to be in the same folder as the entry page of your domain. I.e. http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt

After you created the robots.txt on your computer with notepad or a similar tool (do not use a HTML editor), name it robots.txt (lower case!) and transfer it with your favourite FTP program using the ASCII transfer option.

More information about robots.txt