What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a link partner?

Advantages:
* Making friends with underhand spammers/unknowledgable wannabes

Disadvantages:
* Makes you site look amateurish/rubbish/crummy/stupid/idiotic
* Google may notice if you start doing a lot of them and "punish" you in their index.
* They do not bring in traffic
* Google is making the value of link exchanges less and less all the time

Also, don't think that you can game Google with 3 way link exchanges/1000 way link exchanges - it indexes billions of sites so it KNOWS who is linking to who

I think that covered it pretty well

just to answer the question, we need this links to build up site's quality (this is the advantage and benefit), also it depends on your link partner's site. If the link has no relevance to yours, and also excessive reciprocal links may lead to penalization by SEs (this is the disadvantage and must avoid).

Link popularity is probably the most important factor gain high rankings on the SEs. And link trade is one of the many ways to show up in google.
Link trade with those themed-related websites.For me it doesn't matter if the the site doesn't have PR as long it is related to my site rather with a PR site but not related to my site. SE would just count it as normal link

...and the TV Addicts wonder why we say they give bad advice.

darkwell25: listen to what whym said. Read it, reread it, threeread it, drill it into your head. Understand it as you have never understood anything before. This is your mantra. Live by it.

For those of you who might think whym is wrong, consider this question. Would you rather have:

a) A one-way link that sends pure, organic traffic that you didn't even have to ask for?
b) A one-way link that you had to ask for and that may or may not send traffic?
c) A link that you had to send traffic to in order to get traffic from?

Most of you wouldn't have picked c). c) is also the link exchange route. Funny how most of you wouldn't have picked it, yet you will for perceived SEO gain.

Link exchanges are not a magic bullet to high search engine visibility. Look at the major sites with high visibility (the Wikipedias, the Amazons, the news sites, etc.) Do you see link exchanges there? Nope. Just original content and one way links to it (negative views about Wreckipedia aside).

mhaye, if you're going to give advice, at least make it good advice.

Originally Posted by corlock

just to answer the question, we need this links to build up site's quality (this is the advantage and benefit)

Link exchanges do only one thing relating to your site's quality. They lower it by showing your visitors a bunch of mystery meat linkage. They can also hurt your search ranking because while you're making friends with spammers and scammers, when one of them gets you to link to a bad neighborhood, bye bye Google traffic.

As link exchange don't really give you heavily more traffic, if they are put in a good use, you can have your ranking in google increased. Like it have been said before, it depend on wich website is linking to you. You will also need to make sure that your partner don't have a lot of reciprocal link because this way, the importance of your link is gonna be minimized.

* sighs * I wish people would stop with the "link exchange increases ranking" BS....especially when they're from Canada. Makes me look bad.

There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links. The thing to remember is that Google will never penalize a site for anything that is outside of it's control. Anybody can post of links to your website on a blackballed site in Google and it will have no effect. However, if you were to link out FROM your site to this blackballed site, you could run into problems at Google. I call this getting graybarred when the pagerank dissappears from your site altogether.
Get your links from a combination of reciprocals and one ways. There are hundreds of directories doing this if you can get your site listed.

Here's a "link partner" I just discovered in my logs. I would call it a very high quality link, even if Google doesn't know about the page it's on.

If you have network of web sites - it is really great to have a partner.

Hi guys

I was unfortunate enough to fall into this trap, as i read a few misguided articles telling me to exchange links with other sites, I am slowly learning that recipricol links are not needed at all, as i originally was led to belive. One way links are the way to go.

I think there is a massive different between linking to sites that are true partners, and linking to sites for the sake of getting as many links as you can.

The whole recipricol link thing has been abused for years, webmasters holding other webmasters to ransom just for the sake of link exchanges, its really not on, sooner people stop it the better.

Woc

Originally Posted by darkwell25

What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a link partner?

I wouldn't have link partners I would focus on contextual links or seo campaigns. Reciprocal links don't give you as much credit as they use to back in 2000

google is tired of the so called term excessive linking..

backlinks still the best way to increase ranking...

You may want to read this
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/web-di...-rewarded.html



fastreplies

Link exchanges are NOT important but you have a choice if you do want to do it.

But as for me, I'd rather do the other link building techniques that can give ONE way links that finding a link exchange partner.