Link exchange

It's generally understood that reciprocal links are being devalued by the search engines. It seems that pretty much everyone who knows about SEO has rejected reciprocal links in favor of (preferably natural) one-way links. So if people are keeping up on the newest SEO information they're not going to respond to reciprocal links unless there's a really strong benefit for their site.

If you're going to do reciprocals you'd have to be smart about where they are placed. This article suggests that site-wide links may even be penalized so definitely don't do it that way.

Hi Megan

I agree with you on your reciprocal links part, but as per the sitewide links are concerned.. its a big question mark, as no one can cofirm it because then major sites have that running. And many sites do have Adsense in there, so Google needs to be very greedy to penalise sitewide links. What say ?

I'm not sure about that one either. I think there are some legitimate reasons to have site-wide links (although most of the time it is for advertising or recipricoals). Really, a lot of SEO expertise is speculation but this is coming from someone who knows what he's talking about (AFAIK). Adsense wouldn't be site-wide, though, because the links would change from page to page.

Link Exchange ("Reciprocal Link Exchange") is the practice of exchanging links with other websites. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters. The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange. Also visiting webmaster discussion boards which offer a dedicated link exchange forum where webmasters can request a link exchange be it of a certain category or open to anybody.
Link exchange between non related sites might affect the ranking of websites in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Link Exchange between websites in the same industry can help them and if the website owner does not want to link to direct competitors it is adviseable to exchange links with sites that complement the content of their website.

I still feel that reciprocal links benefit your site in terms of traffic and rankings. I only send a small amount of requests out and generally half will accept. I send very personal emails to quality sites in my field after I have looked over their site, checked PR, made sure the links page is indexed in google and the site is obviously not banned. I think reciprocal links got a bad name because webmasters took advantage of it and created huge directories of unrelated sites. However, if you create a useful directory of quality sites in your field you will benefit. This last update, my links page increased from PR2 to PR4 so I would say google is okay with it.

But because it's a high PR that doesn't mean that it's actually improving your rankings. PR is just a number

However, I agree with what you said in the other thread. Do exhanges for real traffic, not SE's. And personal emails are so important. Most people just send out boring form letters. It might help to butter up the webmaster and tell them why you like their site.

Link exchange still works, though has a somewhat limited advantage than before. Its most beneficial in doing it with sites relevant to your industry.

And if sitewides and crosslinking were bad for seo, organizations like jupitermedia wouldve been penalized like hell as their sites are interlinked and have footer links of each of their sites.

Hi,
Link exchanges are great for targeted traffic and ensuring SE's find your site pages. G suggest doing them with relevant sites.

However, if you are exchanging links in hope of increasing your PR and thus SERP position, you may well be dissapointed. In fact, you may end up being part of a linking scheme designed soley to game the SEs. These type schemes always end up doing more harm that good in the long term. That being said, Google is very unlikely to banish you IF you end up linking to 1 or 2 "bad neighborhoods" by accident.

Set aside a page, or 2, to link to other sites and link to them ONLY IF they are of use to your site visitors. Don't even look at PR, but do ensure the site is not involved in some linking scheme. If unsure, use nofollow

SBalan Group
http://www.sbalanprojects.com/

The bit about being penalized for site-wides is very new. That's the first I've heard about it. As I said above, most SE information is simply speculation by people who know what they're talking about. He did note that it depends on how many unique outgoing links you have - there should be a lot more unique outbounds than reciprocals (which is why I'm not worried about the three site-wides we have on this site)

The point here is that link exchanges are usually an attempt to game search engines and they know that. So they're going to do what they can to weed out the fake links and look for the good ones. They want sites that are helpful for humans. If your links are legitimately helpful for humans and not just there for SE value then you should be in good shape (as long as you don't think any and all links are good for humans!)

Construction - where did you find that bit directly from google recommending reciprocal links? Their webmaster guidelines say to "Have other relevant sites link to yours." which is not the same as trading links. I think there is more information available from them somewhere (and I wouldn't be surprised if that link exchange recommendation was there before....)

I would also be careful about doing links pages that are only for reciprocals. I'm *guessing* that they could identify that those are reciprocal pages and devalue them. I think it's possible for them to stop your site from passing on link value if they think you're trying to game them too much. A good links page could have a mix of reciprocals and one-ways to make it truly useful to humans.

This is direct from the google webmaster guidlines (emphasis added):

google wrote: Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our webmaster guidelines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

I haven't been able to find anything in there about reciprocals (or site-wides) specifically. Those are obviously unnatural links though. So it all goes back to doing links for humans not for search engines.

Nobody has mentioned a three-way link exchange. Is it better? Or has Google managed to discern that as well and has some penalties in store for us?

I've heard of people dong that too. It could work (for now).

My opinion is that anything done solely for the benefit of search engines is risky. They are actively looking for these tactics and will devalue them as soon as they can. So it's like running on a treadmill, continually working but not getting anywhere. Better to get off the treadmill and give them what they want: good content for people I'm noticing the big ("white hat") SEO's focussing a lot more on quality content and natural link building rather than tricks like this.

Good our discussion helped you IAN TAYLOR

Here's a good post on the topic:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001941.shtml#more

Aaron Wall wrote: I often get asked about optimizing reciprocal linking methods, but unless they are associated with real social relationships that pull you into your topical clique I generally think they are not worth the effort and have a poor risk to reward ratio, at least if you are intent on building a long-term brand, and want to rank well in Google.

That sums up my opinion on the matter too. Creating real relationships with other site is good. Swapping a link just for the search engine is pretty useless. Unfortunately, there seem to be very few people out there looking for actual relationships.

Are these link exchanges really helpful for a good listing on search engines. We will have same no of outgoing links as we have the incoming ones. I have heard that outgoing links are a negative in positioning our website.

Read the post I linked to above (and what others have posted here), it explains it well.

Outgoing links will only hurt you if you get connected to so-called "Bad neighbourhoods". Bad neighbourhoods are networks of sites associated with spamming. The will help you if you can connect yourself to good quality, topical neighbourhoods.

Here are few other tidbits on linking. This is from a post about What google might be gathering in its secret employees-only tool. The author speculates that gogle might be tracking the percentage of your links that come from suspected manipulative sources (paid links, linkfarms, comment spam, ad networks, etc. ... IMO reciprocals could be considered manipulative) and even links that come from blogs, wikis, forums, guestbooks or other potentially self-created sources.

(lots of other good info in there. You could read that as an expert's list of what matters to Google).

Everyone has been focusing on relevancy, yes it does matter; however, that doesn't mean you can't have any links off topic linking to you - MAKE the irrelevant link look more natural by embedding it in text. Yes Google knows if you are linking to bad neighborhoods, AND if they reach a storage website link in your recipe site, but if your storage link is for tupperware on your recipe site IT's THEN MADE RELEVANT!

All you have to do is be creative, and don't live under the fear of Google or any other SE banning your site. Just become aware of from whom you get your links, 3-way reciprocals are better than ordinary exchanges - if you site is still relatively new, I recommend exchanges and directory submissions to begin getting spidered and your pages indexed, more than likely you will need to purchase links to get to page 3 or below in Google. Depending on how competitive your keywords are and how many backlinks the #1 spot-holder has, is the answers you will need to know to get on the FIRST PAGE.

It is very possible for everyone to achieve this prestigious position in the SERPs.....you have to have the onsite measures handled - this is what MSN gives most attention, Yahoo likes trusted, established sites, Google likes very trusted sites and gives more weight to .edu and .gov links (as they are the most trusted - also very hard to come by if you are looking for them).

GOOD LUCK!

:wave: Link Diva

In my point of view, the best way to make link exchange is in forums and to make a little relationship with other webmasters - so you can make the link exchange process easier

Ian Taylor;209740 wrote: Why are people responding less to link exchange emails? If that has become an old method, what are the new ways of getting good link exchange?

i would ignore link exchange request frm email as well.
i have to spend too many effort manually to make sure both side links are up running. i tried this method, get zero incoming links as well. i dont think its going to work for now.

If you want link exchanges go to webmaster related websites and go into the forum. They usually have a marketing section with a link exchange sub forum and a lot of people request exchanges in there.

Any link exchanged is good and profitable for the site but relevant links to a site are the best deal as the users of same area of interest are visiting the site and they can be your possible customers in the future if your site is offering any products or services.

My website mentioned in the signature is 3 Month old.
Now i got PR3...Still i like to improve my page rank.Any body ready to link exchange with me??? Please mail us through our contact us form in my website. :p