I believe Link Exchanges still provide quality and useful backlinks that search engine love.
In my experience I have seen big improvements in search engines after getting reciprocal links from related websites and even unrelated websites.
Link exchange guidelines:
1 Get reciprocal links only from any website in any niche. Best thing to do is create a directory with categories and subcategories. Like ebay.com although you won’t need to have hundreds of subcategories. Once you build a strong link exchange directory you will start to attract even more link exchange requests.
2 When submitting your website if they have categories place your site in best category, and email webmaster back if your link is on a link farm (more than 100 other links on the same page)
Usually when I reply and tell them to move my site or show the webmaster they are doing wrong they change and fix the links pages.
3 Pay attention to three way link exchanges from certain type of sites. If you link to site A, and the webmaster then links to you from a directory (not a site) that is no good. At least get a link from a website.
A directory is nothing but a site with links.
4 Do not link exchange with directories. They have no content and most of them have categories that relate to everything you can imagine. Just submit to directories that do not require a link back.
5 Before getting a link from another website make also sure that their home page has some content.
Pay attention if the site has too many popups or really bad design – in that case what I do is check if the homepage is indexed at least… If it is I exchange links with them. I also link to sites hosted on free servers. A link is really that important that if possible do everything you can to get a backlink.
6. Check their links pages, and if they have too many characters in the URL like:
Thisisnumbersix.com/linkspages/ed/categories.__?abc54322121321. (And many characters like that) If it is too long search engines cannot index that page and a link on the page is useless.
So what you do? Just check out if any page of the links pages – or the links pages homepage (if they have a directory style of links pages) if some of the pages are indexed. If some got indexed that exchange links with them… it means probably even the page where they will put your link will get indexed.
Do not worry about these terms like links pages and link directory.
Some webmasters have just a one page on their site, which is suppose to be the page where they put the link exchange partners. They put all links on ONE page.
Bad.
Others like me have a links pages organized with categories and subcategories. We call that a link directory. That is how you should create your links pages…
Those are basic rules.
If you have a blog do blog link exchange, you place their blog on the sidebar and vice versa. They might also accept an article exchange which is even better. Do not though put more than 100 links on your blog sidebar. Till 100 it is ok, more it will look spammy and Google does not like it – it’s called a link farm.
I check to see if my link partners are still linking back once a month, assuming you don’t have some script that does it automatically work for you. Before I delete any links I send the webmaster an email or use their contact form. Sometimes they just move the site to a better location not always remove link.
Getting too many link exchanges at once is also not recommended. That looks very spammy and even worse if they all have same anchor text. I am talking about getting a 100 links a day.
Done slowly and every day, say 30 links a day that is absolutely great! Whatever the amount it must be the same very day approximately. I can tell from my results. It is also good news because you work less.
Regularly, steadily get new backlinks everyday with different anchor texts.
Hope that all this information helps. My niche is very competitive and still I was able to get good results so this shows that it works.
Tags: Link Building, Link Exchanges
