SEO Wordsmith

There’s a myth going around in SEO circles: that link exchanges are an outdated form of marketing.  I want to tell you that’s not true.  Link exchanges should still be part of your overall optimization plan.  That said, there are good and bad ways to conduct a link exchange.

The reason that link exchanges have lost their value is because so many sites have been abusing the privilege.  Automated link exchange software is no better than automated content generation or automated pingback: it’s a form of spam and spiders recognize it as such.  Too many poor link exchanges has cluttered up the web and Google’s main purpose is to reveal the most relevant and useful links in search results.  If you’re linking to hundreds of poor-quality sites, it means your site is less useful and less relevant.

That said, links from high-quality sites can still have a good effect on page rank.  Obviously, these types of link exchanges s are harder to achieve, but to state that link exchanges are a thing of the past is false information.

Quality Links Not Quantity

The good news is that this should save you time.  Instead of just trying to trade links with anyone and everyone, you can hone in on those sites that are really worth your while.  Here’s your link building checklist.

Look for high PR sites.  Your mindset should be that you’d rather have a few quality links from a high-valued site than a legion of links from a PR 0 site.  Those sites won’t enhance traffic or your page rank.  Firefox makes it easy with their page rank tool.

Avoid link farms and low PR directories.  There are plenty of directories with a PR of 5 or better, so stick with those.  Also, keep in mind that getting a thousand links all at once can come across as spam to a Google spider, so you don’t want to use automated directory software any more than you want to use automated link exchange software.

Improve your site’s authority.  A link exchange should always be on topic.  Spiders are looking to see if your site is an authority on a given topic.  So, for example this SEO blog links to other SEO-related sites only.  If I suddenly link to mostly unrelated sites, this will affect the site’s authority.  Likewise, if your own link partners link to unrelated sites, it can affect the value of the link coming to your own site.  Which leads to the next point:

Monitor those links.  Not only should you be paying attention to your own site’s optimization, but you should be monitoring your link partners’ optimization tactics as well.  Periodically check your link partners’ page rank.

Suppose that a link partner suddenly starts using black hat SEO that gets the site banned by Google.  This will affect your site’s own PR – a form of guilt by association.  Page rank is all about establishing authority and trust.  If you link to an untrustworthy site, this will have a bad impact on your site’s authority and trustworthiness.  Now imagine that happening hundreds of times via link exchanges to poorly-conceived sites.

The moral of the story: automation is bad, manual is good.  Yes, it takes a lot longer, but it will also shorten the amount of time it takes to build your PR, especially if your site gets penalized for bannable practices.