- Web Design, SEO, Coding, Hosting and Misc Rants Exchange Links The Right Way
Exchanging links with other websites is a free marketing and SEO technique many webmasters seem to use instinctively.
Link exchanges were popular during the days of the “early Internet”; the late 1990’s and very early 2000’s. Exchanging links with other websites provided webmasters with a bit of traffic, and some boost in their search engine rankings.
Many webmasters of today are exchanging links incorrectly, in the fascination of boosting a site’s Google PageRank. Allow me to define incorrect link exchanges before I keep rambling on..
An incorrect link exchange is when a webmaster decides to exchange links with an IRRELAVENT website just to obtain a large quantity of backlinks to boost both Google PageRank and search engine rankings.
Within the last few years, Google and other major search engines (including both Yahoo! and MSN) have noticed that the purpose of link exchanges on the Internet have devalued. These search engines have now changed their algorithms, the way they rank websites for specific search terms, in the battle against spam and dodgy websites.
Incorrect link exchanges may still boost sites’ Google PageRanks (because of Google’s unique PageRank algorithm), but it will take little effect in effecting a site’s rankings or even traffic.
Exchange links the right way to receive the most out of your website.
If you’re going to exchange links with another website, exchange links with a RELAVENT one. This allows search engines with the ability to “categorize” your website, and gives your website better rankings for search terms that relate to that category (ie: video gaming news website will rank good with video game related search terms).
Personally, I would highly suggest exchanging links with relavent sites SITEWIDE. Sitewide link exchanges allow you to get the most links from a single website to your site, and overall increases your site’s backlink count and link popularity. Sitewide link exchanges also bring your site more traffic from the relavent site that is exchanging links with you - that’s free, targeted traffic to your website.
New concepts have been made by SEO gurus because as stated above, search engines are frequently changing their algorithms (especially to battle dodgy link exchanges). Search engines such as Google can now actually recognize a link exchange going on, and thus the weight of links between the sites are decreased. To battle this, the concept of three-way link exchanging has been proposed.
Three-way link exchanges you to exchange relavent site links with 3+ different websites, as long as each website doesn’t directly link to one another. How this works is Site A links to Site B; Site B links to Site C; and Site C links to Site A. This gives search engines no reference that a link exchange is going on.
For your own reference, you can check out a thread that I created regarding link exchanges and today’s search engine algorithms by clicking here. (Note that my username on that forum is “Monarch” and I am the original author of both that thread.)
I am not saying that link exchanges are worthless; the Internet is a constantly growing library of websites, and there are new ways to exchange links as the old ways to exchange are being devalued by search engines. Think about it: the reason why search engines ever valued link exchanges in the first place is obviously because if an individual found the content of another website valuable, resourceful, or informational, he/she would link to it!
Now…start exchanging links the right way! More targeted traffic and better search engine rankings…for free.
Written by King Justice on February 28th, 2007 with
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