Is Zeus A Good Product For Building A Link Exchange?

One fine day a little over a year ago, I stumbled on a program named Zeus. I found the promotional materials to be extremely interesting - the copy read far different than I had seen before. You see, the website made the usual promises of zillions of hits and bizzillions of visitors. That almost turned me away, but I kept reading.

The copy also promised long nights of hard work. Not the usual line of "do nothing and money will jump into your pocket". Nope. This marketing sheet explained that not only had to work for your traffic, you had to put in an hour or two or more every single day. That didn't sound very easy to me - and that made it worth exploring further.

I downloaded the product and tried it out. The theory is simple. Link exchanges are the best and most important way to build traffic - they are far more important than search engines and other methods. Thus, you need to concentrate on building up quality sets of links, and Zeus helps you do this. 

Zeus is basically a spider. It scans the internet looking for sites which you have trained it to find. How do you train it? First by a complex teaching assignment, then by accepting and rejecting sites. This tends to tell Zeus what keywords and themes to look for.

Built into Zeus is a very primitive email engine. This means as Zeus finds sites it also finds email addresses. You then send email messages to those webmasters asking for a link exchange. The formula (which you are supposed to customize) is thoroughly explained by the documentation.

Once you get confirmation back from the webmasters, you add the sites as "preferred partners" (otherwise they are not preferred and get listed at the bottom of pages) and generate your link exchange pages.

So that's the theory - what's the practice?

To begin with, Zeus is a real pain to use. The program is extraordinarily and unnecessarily awkward to use. To begin with, you must "train" Zeus to look for the types of sites that you want to find. This training step is so incredibly difficult that I wonder how I got through it in the first place. The documentation, how shall I put this, simply sucks. It's among the most confusing piece of rubbish that I've read in a long time.

Zeus is a terribly difficult program to use. It reminds me of a racehorse on steroids taking speed at the same time after being whipped by the jockey, who, by the way, does not KNOW the racehorse is on steroids and has been fed speed. Very hard to control, results unpredictable and almost certainly not what you want. And those kind of racehorses get banned from the tracks...

In spite of that, however, I figured it out and trained my copy of Zeus (the Professional version, which cost me almost $200), and within a short time set the spider loose to find some sites.

It found some sites and yes, some of them exchanged links. I'm convinced that if you really wanted to spend your evenings fighting this product you could indeed build a quality link exchange.

However, there is absolutely no reason to use Zeus to perform this task, and certainly you do not need to spend any money to do so.

You see, the search engines have already spidered the web, and believe me, they have done a much better job at it than you ever could from your home or office. All you need to do is plug your desired keywords into various search engines. This will inevitably locate some sites with which you can exchange links.

Templates? Editing HTML pages is no big deal, and believe me, Zeus does not save you any time here.

Email engine? Lately it's become somewhat of a joke all over the internet. Webmasters get link exchange emails from the Zeus engine all of the time, and they are so recognizable and obvious that they are often (most of the time) discarded as mere spam. To be treated as something other than spam (taken seriously) you have to write custom messages to the webmasters - so Zeus doesn't save any time here either.

One of the biggest problems that I have with Zeus is that it does not maintain the link exchange. There is no method provided in Zeus to see if links still exist (although a primitive method has been added to validate whether or not there is a reciprocal link).

You see, Zeus misses one of the points of a link exchange - maintaining the exchange. The product concentrates on finding new sites, contacting webmasters, and building pages. But there is nothing at all provided to maintain those links after they have been added.

And that's the really difficult part of maintaining a quality link exchange. Going through a dozen or a hundred pages of hundreds of links, checking each one. A product that could do that and maintain the link pages as well would be truly useful.

While I personally have come to find the Zeus product to be insipidly silly, the original purpose was quite good. It was never meant to be a way to "fool" the search engines. What Zeus is hyped as is a method for building an alternative to search engines for people to get traffic to their sites. Search engines tend to cater to the sites which have money (either to pay for optimization or directly to the engines). That does not by any means cater to what surfers want - sites which give them the information that they need. To illustrate, there is an incredible amount of useful information and materials available on personal sites (even on free hosts), yet these are often ignored by search engines, or pushed way down in the listings. Yet these sites often give surfers exactly what they want.

That's why webrings and other systems have evolved - search engines cater to business. This has NOTHING to do with the purpose of the internet, which is communication and information.

The vast majority of surfers have absolutely no interest in purchasing anything. That's probably the main reason why the dot coms failed. Surfers want data.

I have worked very hard to build a set of links using Zeus. What finally turned me off about the product was, I think, the abuse. I have been receiving a dozen emails a week from people using the obviously canned email messages and with obvious Zeus link pages. On top of that, while zeus is great for finding links, I've found it's not so good for maintaining the link pages, which is a huge task. Looking through these link pages for 404 errors and such is a real pain, and I wish Zeus did a better job of automating this process. However, what really burns me up is search engines making decisions about my site based upon wooden rules. To me it's a real pleasure coming across a site with a nicely chosen set of links. I prefer that links be spread through a site on appropriate pages instead of on "links pages". To me, that's the way the internet is supposed to work. Articles can refer to other articles as needed.

Even more of a pleasure is running across a site with a very well run webring (or Webrings). These can be extremely wonderful for surfers when well maintained.

So while obvious link farms might pose a problem for Google, I think that webmasters should be allowed to add them if they desire. Why? Because surfers will chose, with their clicks and return visits, what they want and don't want. And I will tell you, a site with an obvious Zeus directory (or linkstoyou or any of the other ones) tends to turn off surfers. Too many of these kinds of things, and the site will become naturally abandoned. On the other hand, a carefully maintained, well crafted set of Zeus pages will give visitors value and encourage them to return.

One of the problems with Zeus is the developers have been very defensive about all of these issue. If they would simply address the problems, I would react positively. I did pay for the full product and then for the upgrade early this year. I would like to hear more than defensiveness and hyperbole from Cyber-Robotics. The problem is more severe than themeindex.html, it's that zeus is perceived as (and has become) spam. It is no longer just accidentally associated with spam - it has become spam.

Cyber-Robotics must act immediately to correct their PRODUCT, not the perception of it. That's the main issue they are not confronting at the moment. This is NOT a perception problem. This is an actual problem (actually several problems) with their product which cause it to become a spam engine.

So rather than debating the issue and getting defensive and making little vague documentation changes, Cyber-Robotics needs to immediately let their customers know there is a problem, explain it in English, then as quickly as possible modify their program to address it, then send out free updates to the paying customers.

A few years ago, Johnson and Johnson could have written many press releases claiming that only one bottle of tylenol had cynanide or stating that there wasn't a real problem. Instead, they immediately pulled over a hundred million dollars of product off the shelves and took positive action to correct the PROBLEM. The issue quickly faded away.

Later, Firestone had a problem with it's tires and has spent millions claiming it's not their problem - and the issue seems to come up again and again. If Firestone would say, yes, there is a problem, recall the bad tires, and fix the bad assembly line (or reengineer the tires or whatever), then their issue would quickly fade away.

As it is, I still purchase tylenol. I no longer purchase firestone tires, because I don't trust the company.

so Cyber-Robotics, do the responsible thing - admit the issue, correct it and get on with business. Otherwise, zeus will most likely go the way of FFA pages and the like.

And Zeus, unfortunately, is a good idea with a very, very poor implementation. My advice is to save your time and money and find a different solution.

Additional Information

• Products - Zeus Want to build up a nice set of links for your web site? You cannot do better than Zeus - but be prepared to spend some time at the game.