Commercial Web Pages - How to Avoid Getting Trapped!

1. What is a ‘Commercial’ Webpage?

Information is put on the internet for a variety of reasons; some pages are created by groups or individuals with altruistic motives, others by companies in order to sell you a product. While some commercial pages are fine, let’s draw an analogy with T.V. – where do you think you would be more likely to find impartial information... a commercial or from a documentary program?

2. Why Commercial Web Sites are often Dead Ends

It is easy to get ‘trapped’ inside commercial sites – since it is not in their interests to lead you to any alternatives to their product, many don’t have any external links or else have external links as part of a ‘pay per click thru’ deal with other companies. This doesn’t help much if you’re looking for a non-commercial (or free) solution. The old method is to keep clicking the [BACK] button on your browser until you returned to a non-commercial, outward linking page.

Portals are 'gateway' (index) pages. Some are altruistic, others commercial but they sell advertising or links, so they have a lot of links to competing commercial pages.
Click on the image on the right to see how a portal is structured.  ->


3. Using Backward Links to reach new portal pages
Backward links provide a way to get out of commercial sites, by listing all the sites that link to a particular page. So, if you’re at a commercial page, it won’t list competing commercial pages, but it will list portal pages that are linked in. These pages will most likely direct you to a lot of other sites – such as competing ones (or even free ones).

Now you can explore the web by hopping backwards and forwards along links, in and out of commercial sites,  navigating past sites that try to ‘trap’ you by not linking out.

 [Navigating with alternate forward and backward links]

The old way of doing a backward link search was to type a URL directly into the search box. These days I use the Google Toolbar [currently Internet Explorer only I'm afraid], which quite automates the task - just click on the Page Info menu and select 'Backwards Link'.

Other search engines probably have an equivalent method of doing this.
This advice is offered for free. However, it did cost me time to write up what I know and to put it on the net. I therefore request that, it you find it useful, you please spend a little of yours to tell me so. This will help me know how much importance to attach to expanding this section.

Last modified: 31st January, 2003