The rise of IWS is attributed to shear volume of webpages available online - now well over 2 Billion. Once, website visibility was not an issue - now it's a major headache.

There are 5 steps to dealing with IWS:

1. Recognise symptoms 2. Test for it 3. Recognise you are a sufferer 4. Take medicine & commit to recover 5. Immunise against future outbreaks

1.Recognise symptoms

Lack of "hits" and lacklustre profits are most common symptoms. These are caused by website appearing to be invisible to anyone searching for it's products, services or content, due to disastrous search engine rankings. Consequently, potential customers are lost to competition.

It is normal for virtually every site on web to maintain a list of links to "favorite", "featured" or "special" places to visit. This is almost never done with permission, nor does it need to be.

Remember that we are discussing linking to pages on other web sites, not graphics, zip files, sound files or anything else. Only HTML-style pages are acceptable for cross-linking. Linking to other types of media files is called bandwidth stealing and is highly unethical. Also remember, do not link to other people's CGI routines without permission.

There is some concern over acceptableness of this linking behavior. Some commercial sites are not happy with linking because it bypasses their "home page" or sidesteps their advertising. There is even some discussion that linking is a trademark infringement or violates some other sacred rights.

This is all silly talk by people and organizations who completely misunderstand nature of world wide web. The best practice of everyone creating a site is to complete ignore this asinine discussion totally and to link vigorously and constantly.

In my opinion best way to think of linking is to associate it with "fair use" laws. These are laws which allow people to include short quotes from published and copyrighted works in their own materials. This is not illegal or unethical - in fact it is absolutely necessary. Imagine how difficult it would be for a college student to write a term paper if he could not quote authors, or how impossible it would be for a critic to do his job if he could not include a few lines from work he was writing about.