Article in SEO

In the past years on the world wide web, exchanging links was a great way to not only build up backlinks, but also to promote your site to gain click-through visitors. However, in recent days, link exchanges - like buying links - have gone under fire. Less sites are offering to exchange links. This is because there is less incentive to do so.

While links may have counted for something in the past, they no longer count for much, if anything. This is partly because of people who spam sites or used excessive or deceptive link exchanges to promote their websites.

When link exchanges did count for more, only links from related websites mattered. If a link came from a site that wasn’t about the same topic, it would be, and still is, disallowed. This is the case for virtually all links on external websites that you don’t own. It became worthless, and a waste of money. While it isn’t proven, it’s possible that some search engines, namely Google, may even penalize a site for linking from unrelated content or by participating in link exchanges (or link sales, for that matter).

Links that are from related sites with related content are better. For example, if you have a guitar related site, it’s better to get links from guitar related sites pointing towards your own. If the site is a link directory though, it will most likely be devalued.

Links exchanges have also been devalued since the number of website pages on the internet have grown exponentially. There are millions and millions more pages online than there were last year. This makes link exchanges worth less and less in most cases. One main exception would be when the site you exchanged links with was a high traffic site with a high Google PR. However, sites with high PR are not sites that really need link exchanges, so, in most cases, they won’t do the exchange.

Link exchanges also have the problem of some dishonest (or forgetful) webmasters who will take down your link after you make the link exchange. Sometimes it’ll be a few days after you make the exchange, but oftentimes it’s a few weeks or even months before they take it down. They think you’ll forget about it and then they can exchange with someone else, take down their link, and just repeat the process. Other webmasters may remove the link, forgetting on the deal of the exchange.

The problems above are but a few of the problems with link exchanges. They are the main reasons that Google, Yahoo!, and some other search engines discredit sites that exchange links. Link exchanges probably don’t hurt your site at all, but they most likely don’t help it, in most cases.

Think of it this way; two websites trade links. They’re each pointing a link at the other. This makes it obvious that the links were exchanged, so it’s much easier for search engines to notice links that were exchanged. They’re discredited often because, were it not for the link exchange the sites wouldn’t matter.

The only real alternative is to do a three way link exchange. In this scenario one site would point to the other webmaster’s site, and the second webmaster would point to a different site of the first webmaster. This makes it more difficult for search engines to notice.

In the end, link exchanges don’t really help very much. They may have some minor benefit, but oftentimes it isn’t worth the time and effort.