Link exchanges: The poor man's SEO
Large Internet companies spend millions on consultants and technology trying to get their sites to rank among the highest results on Google. Everyone else has to rely on the poor man's search-engine optimization: the link exchange.
If you've ever hung up your own shingle on the Web, you've probably gotten an e-mail to this effect at some point: "Dear So-and-so, I believe your site and mine could benefit from exchanging links." We probably get eight to 10 a week in the CNET News general mailbox, mostly from technology-related companies but occasionally from auto-parts suppliers and watch retailers who either have no idea what we do or few moral qualms about spam.
The idea is that if you can coax a link out of a large site like CNET, Google and other search engines will record that link as a vote of confidence in your site's worthiness and improve your ranking in searches for certain topics, thereby boosting traffic to your site. The technique is quite old, dating back even before Google and its PageRank system emerged as the Web's dominant search engine.
But does it still work? And at what point do two or three sites struggling to get off the ground veer off the road from mutual assistance to a full-blown spam operation designed to game the system?
Evan Duffield, for one, thinks it still works. He contacted us trying to get CNET to exchange links with WarpedAI.com, a site he has launched to promote stock-trading tools for day traders, and says he has been able to slowly build up the PageRank of another site he owns using techniques that don't run afoul of Google's Webmaster guidelines.
"It's kind of a vicious circle," he said. "To start a new business you need PageRank, but to get PageRank you need links to your service. You have to get the ball rolling."
PageRank is the currency of the Web. Google's novel approach to site indexing way back when was to evaluate the worthiness of a site based on how many other sites were linking to it, also taking into account the worthiness of the sites passing along the links. This meant, and still does mean, that a link from a site with a high PageRank counts for way more than a link from a site with low PageRank.
But how do you get a link from one of those sites? Google's official advice: "The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community." That, of course, sounds like something your mother would say.
In a Web as vast as this one, getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking. Bloggers can discuss each other's work and help each other build up a following, but if you're selling a product or service it can be much more difficult to climb the ranks of search results for things like "day-trading software" when you're starting from scratch.
So Webmasters like Duffield turn to solicitations for links. Danny Sullivan, who writes about search-engine optimization for Search Engine Land, says "if you're a new site, absolutely you want to be doing link building. But you need to be doing that in a smart fashion."
Duffield says he's very careful to only solicit links from sites that are related to his product: his pitch for exchanging links that somehow wound up at our doorstep was addressed to computer-go@computer-go.org, a mailing list for hobbyists trying to tackle the difficult chore of building a computer AI system for the ancient game of go.
That was a mistake, he said; the result of prematurely hitting send on an e-mail template. Duffield compiles his targets by searching for sites that are related to finance and stock trading, and attempts to contact a general e-mail address to pass along his site's information and offer a link exchange.
"It's not about the actual links so much as it is optimizing search queries," Duffield said. "When I figure out a query I want from Google, I can see the top three positions have this much page rank and this many positions, and try to beat that out."
As long as people like Duffield are exchanging links without offering payment, or crossing obvious lines such as breaking captchas and posting spam links in guestbooks or comment forums, they're following the spirit of Google's Webmaster guidelines.
"Where it tends to get into tricky issues is where people are doing it primarily for payment," Sullivan said. "Search engines would see links as votes. Google does not like that people would simply be buying links to do better.
While paid links are clearly off-limits, Google appears to ban link exchanges in general, saying it does not allow "excessive link exchanging" but failing to define exactly what constitutes "excessive." Other practices that are verboten include links to "bad neighborhoods" on the Web and complicated networks of several Web sites with little content but pages and pages of links amongst themselves that Google can usually identify.
For the most part, however, the practice is rampant enough that only the most egregious violations get snagged. "If you start thinking too much about not getting caught, you're probably doing things you shouldn't be doing," Sullivan said.
In an era where SEO is a budding industry unto itself, link exchanges are perhaps the most basic approach. Far below the realm of those dithering over Google's search index are those like Duffield trying to make something out of literally nothing.
While he needs to build PageRank equity to get started, Duffield acknowledges that at a certain point that Google is right: a site will live or die on its content. Link exchanges only work to get one's name out there: the real boost needed to turn a Web site into a business comes when real people start discussing and linking to a service on blogs, message forums, and social-networking sites.
That's when your search ranking (and therefore traffic) really starts to grow, he said. "If you can make Google see that something is being talked about all over the Internet, what choice do they have?"
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
The ability to pay to create the impression of incoming links to my website means from other websites, really to me, sounds unfair. And Google is all about tweaking to make there search engine better and more fair (supposedly)
Being a Search Engine Marketing consultant for the past 10 years I think it would have been better if you had also added input from someone within the SEO industry before publishing this. Link Exchange, as a form of link building, has not been a recommended best practice for some years. The form of trading links between 2 websites is an easy pattern for Google to detect and penalize a site for. The search engines long ago determined that most of these types of links offer visitors little or no value to human visitors and are only participated in to manipulate a sites rankings in the search results. I fear that your article will result in too many uninformed website owners trying to build links this way and end up hurting their sites link reputation in the process.
Just last week I had a lengthy conversation with a potential client who's website rankings in Google were hurt badly by this practice. He was originally on the 3rd page of the search listings for some of his most important keywords and after working with a bad link building company ended up on the 10th page due to the link exchange services that they they told him were a best practice.
The advice I give my clients is to not participate in link exchanges. There are other ethical ways to build links to your website that do not have the risk of being penalized or banned by Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask. If you want to find out more about some of them try reading the blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog
Best regards,
James Svoboda
SEO Since 1999
http://www.linkedin.com/in/realicity
7 Preferred Link Building Alternatives to ?Link exchanges: The poor man?s SEO? by CNET
Visit: http://www.webranking.com/blog/
NOTE TO GOOGLE: The real purpose of a link to a site is not for SEO, but TO MAKE A SALE. DUH!
So, now I have implemented my own link exchange mechanism on my web site in a way that adds value to the link. If Google is going to penalize me for that, then they are cutting off their nose to spite their face, because advertising is THE ONLY THING THEY DO.
Link exchange is poor man's SEO.
Our website ( http://www.dmaxonline.com )has only few links in xchange link directories but has good results in SERPs.
Thank you for the article sir.
- Page rank is no longer as valuable as it once was. Page rank is important, but once again it holds little weight to where you will end up on the search engine results.
- Building up incoming links can be time consuming, but it has its importance. However people should not obsess over it. Better time can be spent creating relevant content that is helpful to your customers, readers, or clients.
- This myth should be debunked right away: Trading links with relevant sites is NOT bad. Google won't penalize people for trading links. If it does ever happen it typically is by mistake or the person truly went out of their way to spam links. Not every site out there is trying to 'fool' Google.
-Link building has become much harder then it used to be because of the rel="nofollow" tags implemented by most search engines. I believe the rel="nofollow" was both a smart and bad idea on search engines. Hurting legit sites while at the same time battling spammers.
In my personal opinion, the Google system is broken. It is actually outdated. Their long and on-going battle with spammers have put people who are trying to be legit at risk. While Google will more than likely not penalize people for exchanging links, there have been rumors of them doing so. I truly miss the 90's where almost every page had a links page. Now people hold their links so securely they are scared Google will penalize them for it.
I do not blame Google for this, but the spammers themselves who have turned the web into money making schemes to better improve their own self-interest than others.
People place too much emphasis on the Google Toolbar PR value, which really has no meaning in this type of link building because the links one obtains usually don't come from the pages that have the highest Toolbar PR value.
That is equivalent to seeing an Audi on a dealer's lot with a price tag of $45,000 and asking for a Geo that is only selling for $15,000. You think you're getting the $45,000 vehicle when in fact you're driving off with the cheapest car on the lot.
The search engineers understand that link exchanges occur naturally for many reasons. They are only concerned about sites trying to manipulate their PageRank or search results listings through massive link building.
-Allison
http://www.wedowebcontent.com
To encourage this & to benefit both the customer & the website owner at least what Google,Yahoo & MSN could do is to give an incentive to those websites which provide free support through answered questions,free email support etc to get back-links with "Do-follow" attribute.
- by sm911 November 1, 2009 5:40 AM PST
- The best way for <a href="http://www.seoborg.com">SEO</a> linkbuilding is one-way links. We can use reciprocal link building if only both sites are highly relevant with each other in terms of content.
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