Exchanging links is important for search engine ranking. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The key is in how it's done.

About link exchanges

A link exchange is an agreement between two parties to place reciprocal links on their respective websites. It is not the same as a link farm, which is a website that consists primarily of indiscriminate links to other sites (sometimes called FFA, or free for all sites). Link farms are bad, and became popular for one reason: search engines love inbound links. At least they used to, until the spammers came along.

Long ago, Google figured out that a measure of website popularity is how many other sites link to it. These links were considered "votes" for that site, and Google tended to rank highly a site or a page with a lot of votes, regardless of where those votes came from.

Once spammers figured this out, it was only a matter of time before they leveraged this knowledge by artificially increasing the number of "votes" for their site by spamming FFA link farms, message boards, and other public forums.

This actually worked at first. But Google realized that if the public were to trust its search results, it would have to change its algorithm to penalizes such indiscriminate linking. So the search was on for bad neighborhoods.

What's a bad neighborhood?

A bad neighborhood is a link farm or other untrustworthy source of inbound links. In other words, it's a place you need to stay away from. Bad neighborhoods include FFAs, gambling sites, porn sites, and other sites susceptible to spammers.

In fact, many of the ads you see for software that claims to give you thousands of visitors for a very low price is actually software that spams public message boards. Don't ever buy this software or hire anyone who does this kind of stuff. You may get a few visitors, but it will be webmasters and system administrators trying to look you up so they can blacklist you as a "bad neighborhood." You don't want that!

Link exchanges, when done properly, will help your search engine ranking. Inbound links from bad neighborhoods will not.

Why link exchanges are still important for SEO

Link exchanges are still important for SEO (search engine optimization) because cross linking between related sites helps both visitors and search engines to understant the relevance of a site for a particular topic. If architect websites links to related sites within the industry, and (more importantly) receive inbound links from them, Google and the other search engines can better understand their content by analyzing their link relationships to each other.

If, on the other hand, a real estate website links to attorneys, auto dealers, prepaid phone card salesmen, or Avon reps, it will probably hurt its search engine ranking. Carefully plan and manage your link exchange program to include only links relevant to the content on the site. Real estate agent should only exchange links with other real estate agents and real estate related services.

Of course, it's always best to get inbound links that don't need to be reciprocated. One way links are preferred to reciprocal linking, but that's not the subject of this tutorial!

Managing link exchange campaigns

Managing a link exchange campaign can be tedious and time consuming, if you want your website to bring in new leads, it's worth the expense and effort to do it right. If you're wondering why your site's not performing well on Google, the absence of quality inbound links to your site could be one reason why.

Done well, a link exchange will be useful to your website visitors, and will help you tremendously to improve your search engine ranking.

And if you don't have the time or expertise to do it, I can probably help you with that.

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