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There’s what might only seem like a minor kerfuffle regarding the linking policies of Web Merchants, Inc., who’s holdings include the popular EdenFantasies shops, magazines, and community groups.

AlwaysArousedGirl, who broke her ties with Web Merchants some time back, has posted an essay by web expert and KinkForAll co-founder Maymay explaining the problem in technical, social, and editorial terms.

A few nights ago, I received an email from Editor of EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine, Judy Cole, asking me to modify this Kink On Tap brief I published that cites Lorna D. Keach’s writing. Judy asked me to “provide attribution and a link back to” SexIs Magazine. An ordinary enough request soon proved extraordinarily unethical when I discovered that EdenFantasys has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity, a courtesy on which the ethical Internet is based.

Read the rest of Maymay’s essay at AAG’s site here.

The very short version is that while the company solicits guest posting from outside bloggers and encourages them to link back to their own sites and the sites of other bloggers and vendors, they use sophisticated javascript hacks to make sure that while their “links” in posts and blogrolls work correctly for viewers (in other words they work for people who click on them from their browsers) but that they’re invisible to Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other automated, but extremely important automated indexers.

The result is that links from inside Web Merchant’s websites are never counted in search-engine page rankings. Search-engine page rankings really, really matter both as points of pride for individuals, as visibility to vendors, and as pricing metrics for anyone who relies on online advertising revenue.

It’s particularly sticky, as Maymay indicates, when on the one hand Web Merchant content managers invite outside web authors to do link exchanges and when they try to require outside authors who cite them to “properly” link back to them (thus upping Web Merchant’s page rankings) while on the other hand the “links” back to outside websites are effectively blocked.

I’m more of a social sex blogger than a sex sex blogger, and so I haven’t had much of anything to do with vendors like Web Merchant’s EdenFantasies or SexIs online magazine. I regularly decline requests for link exchanges. So all this is technically no skin off my back.

And as a webmaster I’m vaguely sympathetic to their assertions that it’s all really just a security measure to “protect” outside sites. (From what I’m not sure… maybe they think higher Google Page Ranking can cause allergic reactions the way peanuts do.) More likely I suspect the scheme probably started out as a way to easily track outbound clicks and maybe to help track and manage dead or dying links. I dunno. Maybe that’s how it started.

But!

However the practice started the behavior Maymay carefully details is currently unseemly at best and a serious breach of internet ethics at worst. (It is not, repeat not, illegal nor is anyone with credibility, including Maymay and AAG, saying otherwise.) It’s certainly is a breach of social networking standards and certainly looks like an attempt to hoard social capital.

They ought to cut it out. As I said it’s no skin off my back that they behave this way because I neither give links nor (as far as I know… but then how would I know?!?!) do they ever link back to me. But if I was affiliated with them, and especially if I provided them links and content in good faith, if they didn’t end their practice, and end it immediately, I wouldn’t feel reluctant at all to sever my relationship with them. Further, I’d certainly understand, and support, anyone who likewise severed their relationships.

Update: I forgot to mention when I wrote this that my criticism of the mechanical back-end behavior of the website (which is really, really bogus) should not be taken as a criticism of the people who contribute on the front end either as staff, contractors, recruited volunteers, or, well, volunteer volunteers. That’s because, again, I know very few of them, and also because they appear to be very well spoken and well-spoken of by others in the larger online community. I’ll just say that because content contributors are so well regarded it seems like a shame that back-end link-hiding shenanigans would be hurting not just their credibility but also their visibility elsewhere on the web.

Update: As I mentioned in reply to a comment, below, deliberately obscuring outbound links is a social-media version of wiping your nose on someone else’s shirt — not at all illegal, no, but still awfully rude.