Are Link Exchanges Dead?

If you read an SEO book from the late 1990’s you undoubtedly would have read about ways to exchange links with other website owners.  Great tools came out to help assist the link exchange process.  The idea here was to show the search engines that you are relevant and that your site deserves to rank high for specific key phrases.  However, Google changed the rating of link exchange and started to penalize sites if there was rampant abuse of linking.  Specifically they targeted paid links.

So, does this kill link exchange as a tactic?  Yes and no.  I would say that link exchange is still a big part of the internet.  Your ranking still is somewhat based upon how relevant others think your site is.  Powerful links from highly regarded websites, which we call authority sites, can give you a huge push in rankings.

However, other aspects of search engine optimization may prove better over time.  It is far better to focus your attention on creating quality content, videos, articles, and great on-page organization so that visitors will continue to return to see your content in the future.  You can have a link exchange program and sign up with the various link exchange programs that exist out there.  However, spending thousands of hours to get a few hundred links may not be worth your time.  Over time your content rich site will start getting natural links back to you (one way links). You may want to do some press releases and increase your power through authority websites.  Your time is too valuable to spend thousands of hours on link exchange.  For 80 bucks on PRWeb you can do a release and get thousands of links back to your site almost instantly.  This is far less work than old-fashioned begging to exchange.

However, I strongly suggest that you look for other SEO minded linkers and whenever you have a new web project, contact them and see if you can get 50-100 good links from your partners (other website owners that have linked with you in the past).  These are easy to do and implement.  You may create an excel spreadsheet with the email address of other link-exchangers and their web properties and create a network so you can get the word out to their base when you launch your new site.  This is time-effective link -exchanges.

Software exists to check to see if you get a link back with the other website.  This way you don’t have to keep checking to see if your link is still there.  However, if you have a link partner that you have linked with in the past, you should be able to trust them and that they won’t just remove your link.

I do believe that 3 way linking is a thing of the past, at least for Google.  Many people used 3 way linking in order to protect their link power so that Google will not leak the power of a single inbound link.  Basically you would have 2 websites and your exchange partner has one.  They link to your main site and your secondary site links to them.  Fortunately Google has cracked down on this trickery.

Also, if you can make link exchanges natural, it is far better than to have a thousand links listed on a link-exchange page.  Write an article and put the link to your site in it.  Give this out to your exchange partner rather than having it on a massive link exchange page.  It is easy to do this using article submission.  Article submission will give you a link back in your signature block.  This is powerful and is worth more than a 90’s style link exchange.

So, link exchange is alive and well today, but smart web owners know that the old way of getting links are not an effective use of their time.  It is better to focus on content.  Create it.  Hire people to write it.  And if you want, hire people to post it on the various article directories, or in your various blog properties.  This is far better than 2 way exchanges and less time consuming.