Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination

Link Exchange Procedures

• Place the Pierce County Library System link on an unframed HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or SSI (Server Side Includes) formatted page. The Library does not permit framing of the Pierce County Library Web pages.
• Use the Pierce County Library website link on your site directly. The Library does not permit the Pierce County Library website link on third-party sites or on different domains.
• The page on which you put the Pierce County Library link must contain less than 40 outbound links.
• The page on which you put the Pierce County Library link must be reachable from the homepage of your site.

Link Exchange Restrictions:

• You may not use the official seal of logotype of the Pierce County Library System without the consent of the Library’s Marketing and Communications Director or their delegate.
• You should not use meta tags or robots.txt to prevent search engine indexing the page on which you put the Library’s link.
• You may not link directly to a PDF file on the Pierce County Library System web server.
• You may not pull graphics from the Pierce County Library System Web site, without permission from Library’s Marketing and Communications Director or their delegate.
• You may pull text from the Pierce County Library System website, as long as you attribute the text to the Pierce County Library System.
• You may not link by way of a Three-Way-Link to the Pierce County Library website.
• The Library will not link to sites promoting a certain organization/agency beyond basic information about such organization/agency.
• The Library will not link to sites with materials known to be illegal.

How to exchange link with Pierce County Library?

You should establish a functional hyperlink to the Library’s website before requesting link exchange. If, after thoroughly reading the information on this page, you have a technical question, a question regarding your website’s eligibility to link to the Library, or would like to link to a page other than those provided in HTML, use the Feedback link on the Library’s website. If you are especially concerned as to whether your website will qualify, the Library can preview your website and pre-qualify it before you expend the effort of establishing a link to our site. In general, please allow at least 48 hours for pre-qualification.

When soliciting a reciprocal link from Pierce County Library, please adhere to the requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act; include a valid e-mail address and the physical address of your organization. A phone number is helpful. Include your name and title. The Library System does not accept requests for link exchange from third parties. Due to the high volume of third-party requests the Library receives, it will not respond to such requests, nor will it respond to incomplete requests or requests, which the Library believes to be deceptive.

Write a personal e-mail to webref@piercecountylibrary.org indicating why a link to your website will benefit visitors to the Library’s website. Be sure to provide the URL for the link so the Library can locate it on your site. In addition, provide a brief description (about two sentences maximum) that you would like the Library to post with your link. The Library may shorten your description.

Upon receipt of your e-mail requesting a link exchange partnership, the Library will verify your link to its website and perform one of the following actions:

1. If your website qualifies for Pierce County Library System Link Exchange Partnership, the Library will install a reciprocal link to your site on the Library’s community resources page or the most closely related web page.
2. Pierce County Library may install a content link on one or more web pages on its site. Installation of topical web page links is at the Library’s discretion.

In order for the Pierce County Library System Link Exchange Partners to remain in good standing, member websites must continue to conform to the Library’s stated Website Link Exchange Policy. Links to the Library’s website must remain operational and verifiable. The Library allows for intermittent failure due to normal web hosting problems.

Liability

The Pierce County Library System website may contain links to other websites operated by third parties. The linked sites are not under the Library’s control and the Library is not responsible for their content. Such links do not imply the Library’s endorsement or guarantee of the products, information, or recommendations provided by any third party site.

The third-party site may have a privacy policy different from the Pierce County Library System and may provide less security than the Pierce County Library website. The Library disclaims all liability with regard to public access to such linked websites. The Pierce County Library System provides links to other sites as a service to customers, and access to any other sites linked to the Library’s website is at an individual’s own risk.

Notes

Three-way linking: Three-way linking, so named because it involves link exchange among three websites instead of two. This link exchange format should more accurately be termed indirect linking because its purpose is to conceal an exchange of links among websites in an attempt to fool search engines into thinking that only one-way links exist.

Reference to Related Policies and Procedures

Web site Link Exchange Policy
Web site Privacy Policy

Last Revised

October 11, 2010, August 18, 2021