Link Exchange Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make
Posted on September 3, 2007
Filed Under SEO
Although link exchanges are supposedly losing the importance of bringing pagerank and higher search engine rankings to your website, they are still working.
Why supposedly? Well, I’ve read a lot of articles stating that reciprocal link exchanges are dead, but have never found any scientific proof.
But I did find this on Matt Cutts’ blog:
“Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking.”
So exchanging links is not wrong, as long as it is not excessive.
In fact, one of the popular things among bloggers right now is to share the “link love” by linking to some good articles that they find on the web.
Some call it Speedlinking, some call it That’s a Wrap!, some call it the Link Attack and so on.
Why are they doing it?
Well, if you ask them they will say it’s because it’s beneficial to their users, but I wonder how much of that motivation to link out comes from hoping that the other site will link back?
My guess is 80% for a link back and 20% for their visitors. 
Eventually most of the sites being linked to feel the pressure of returning the link, they link back and there you have it – a reciprocal link.
Where to find websites to exchange links?
Typical quality sites are listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directory. You can start your search there (in your relevant niche) and ask for a link exchange.
But please don’t make these 3 mistakes when you are asking for a link:
1. Mistake #1: The-I-Really-Want-To-Rank-High-For-This-Keyword.com
I get an email with a link exchange subject and it says:
“Hi, I am the webmaster of http://www.weight-loss-and-free-diet-plans.com and I …”
This is where I stop reading, delete the email and do something more important with my life.
Come on! The keywords in the title are killing me and they make Google laugh at you.
That’s NOT how the game is played. Get real.
I could maybe read more of the email if the domain was http://www.weight-loss-tips.com or something like that, but I don’t promise it.
I would surely read the email further if the domain name was dietingtips.com or beyonddieting.com or eatwell.com (note: these are all real sites).
Short, catchy and telling you what the site is about.
2. Mistake #2: Your Mummy And Daddy Are Not Spoiling You Anymore
If the website owner passes the domain name test and I eventually click on the link to check the website, the pagerank indicator on my Google toolbar shows this:
That’s a PR of 0.
What you are trying to achive is NOT a fair trade.
If your homepage has a PR of 0 and you want to get a PR of 3 (which is on my resources page or my internal pages), you must have been a very spoiled child whose parents gave you everything without you doing anything useful for them.
That’s NOT how life and business work.
Some people are very soft and generous when it comes to $$$ so you might persuade them with money to give you a link, but honest webmasters will just want a similar share of PR sent back, either from this or another site that you have.
There are two typical reasons why you may have a PR of 0:
a) Your site is young (less than 3 or 6 months) and it doesn’t have enough incoming links to show any pagerank value (and the pagerank in the Google toolbar hasn’t been updated yet).
That doesn’t tell me if you are a serious or persistent person who will do a lot of work to get good pagerank and I don’t trust you.
If you have a PR of 4+, then I know that you have many incoming links which took you a lot of time to get and that your site is good enough that other websites link to you.
b) You may be penalized by Google since you may be linking to other penalized sites (porn, link farms, whatever, …)
If I link to you, my site will get penalized too.
In either of the above cases linking to you is too risky because you haven’t proven to me that you are someone who will return my good deed (link).
So, as soon as I see a PR of 0, I delete the email and go back to doing something useful with my life. My time is too valuable to spend it checking whether you are penalized or not.
3. Mistake #3: The Worthless Links Page
I read the email: bla, bla, link exchange, bla bla, your site very good, bla, bla, beneficial to our sites, bla, bla, …
Ok, let’s see:
Domain name – check (not too bad)
Homepage PR – check (3+, ok)
The page where you intend to link back to me – PR0 or very low PR with 78 outgoing links
I delete the email and go back to … (OK, you know the story by now).
Every page is assigned a PR and if you want a fair trade then your links page must have a good PR (let’s say at least 2) and less than 30 outgoing links.
Since pagerank is divided by the number of outgoing links from that page, I will get 1/30th of PR passing from that page, which may or may not be acceptable for me.
But at least you have a chance. Since I already spent 20 seconds of my life checking your site, I might as well make that time worthwhile.
So if you want to make a fair trade either have your links pages with good PR or MUCH better; exchange links from within content from relevant pages.
That way you’ll get more PR from my page (I may have a PR3 internal page with only one outgoing link), the page actually gets traffic from targeted visitors who will follow my recommendation to your site through a keyword link text that makes sense and boosts your site’s ranking for that keyword, so you won’t only get much better PR but also VISITORS.
Aren’t the visitors what you are after?
You are building pagerank to get higher search engine ranking so that you get more visitors, right?
Why don’t you do BOTH at the same time when you exchange links? You’ll get more PR juice from my page and more visitors.
Return the favor and we are all happy – you, me, Google, the green PR line in the Google toolbar and our visitors.
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11 Responses to “Link Exchange Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make”
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Most people don’t care about “pagerank”. The majority of internet users don’t know what it is.
What they do know is they want relevant search results returned when they Google something.
Webmasters crave pagerank like a boozer on a bender. And guess what? The result is that a lot of people searching Google are getting pissed off when some meaningless SEO driven drivel fills the first ten to twenty pages of search results, all because webmasters play these silly games.
The majority of internet users also don’t know anything about how links on one website can mean anything to Page rank.Some web surfers click on anything and don’t care what a webmaster might think.
I think Google is probably working very hard to change how they serve the public at large, and to hell with all the SEO’s and their games.
I fully agree with, China. They say “Content is King” but in fact, that’s true ONLY when this content is found.
And the way Google works now is that you need very good links to make that happen.
Yes, I wish there was a better way to find out whether the content on one page is really valuable but as long as Google plays the pagerank game, so must we.
Great post, very solid advice on PR.
I have never really thought about it that way, but it does make sense.
I guess I should be a little more stingy with my link love.
link exchange is alive and well! I have a fishing charter business and I link exchange with other businesses in my local area. Its a great way to send relevant traffic to my site and my search rankings are better than ever. I use link manager software to make everything easier and my google rankings are better than ever. dont link with junk sites that have nothing to do with your company or business.
Adam: Thanks, I also read somewhere that one PR4 link with no other outgoing links from that page is worth more than 1000 PR0 links. Makes you think where to invest your time…
Daniel: Yes, link exchanging from relevant pages will always work since it’s natural to link to the topics your site is talking about.
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If a site have a pagerank of 4+, I don’t think they will be aggressive to do links exchange anymore.
Anyway, I think if a site that have good contents and have page/blog post more then 50 original content pages is good enough to links for me. We all new once, if a new blog show good content, we should links it even though it’s pagerank 0, our mind is smarter then google pagerank:)
Just stop thinking about PageRank and link to whatever you think it’s relevant for your story, you won’t have to worry about getting kicked in the arse by Google anyway.
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yeah… but how about a system that automatically links your blog to blogs similar to yours?.. and you don’t have to do anything… wouldn’t that be great?
well.. i found something… “and it’s worked out pretty well so far” (tony stark :)) )… for those of you guys interested, check out http://www.blogs21.com
China hit the nail on the head. Google doesn’t care about content, people do. I’ve seen many a website with great content and a big fat zero Pagerank. Google needs to sort the PageRank business out, and start making content a priority (if it can). PageRank on its own is often meaningless!!!