The Future of Link Exchange

Is Link Exchange Really Dying?

In the recent months, there has been a lot of speculation regarding link exchange and its future. A lot of webmasters believe that link exchange is dying and soon will disappear altogether. Although the process of exchanging links is changing it seems that it is far from its end.

Why Is Link Exchange Important?

Major search engines base their ranking on the number of quality backlinks a website has. This way of ranking websites prevents content abuse and seems to work relatively well for such search engines as Google. However, this system gives a clear advantage to large networks of websites that can easily promote a new website by pointing links to it from the rest of their well ranked websites. That is exactly why link exchange concept became so popular among smaller website owners. Link exchange enables smaller websites to improve each other’s ranking by exchanging links between each other.

What’s Wrong With Link Exchange?

To the contrary of what some webmasters believe, there is absolutely nothing wrong with exchanging links between websites. The problem is that link exchange, just like the rest of website promotion techniques out there, became a victim of abuse. Webmasters started sticking each others links in link directories and partner pages which soon grew into what is now called “link farms”. Naturally, search engines took measures to save the integrity of their search results and soon a lot of backlinks that were created as a result of those kinds of link exchanges were dropped from SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Mistakes To Avoid

People have been doing link exchange for all the wrong reasons. Thousands of webmasters are still worried about things like Google PageRank and Alexa ranking. Most webmasters worry more about the amount of PR then the quality of the backlink. They are forgetting that link exchange can bring you high quality, targeted traffic as well as ranking in search engines. Below are some radical suggestions that will bring you traffic from your link partners and improve your ranking.

  1. Do not exchange links with just anyone. Study your link exchange partner’s website; check its backlinks, content, etc. Ask yourself: are the services your link partner offers complement your own? Will their visitors going to be interested in your services? Treat each link exchange as a strategic partnership, take your time and it will pay off, both with quality traffic and better search engine ranking.
  2. Forget about PageRank! PR is not important when deciding on link exchange partners. There are websites that have PR6 and twenty visitors per day and there are also websites that have much lower PageRank with a ton of traffic.
  3. Get rid of those partner pages and link directories with hundreds of links in them. By sticking each other’s links in those places, you are just wasting your time. Implement links on pages that relate to the service that a given website offers. Make sure they are not at the bottom of the page; rather put them in prime locations around your pages. For example, you are running a webmaster resource website which discusses such topics as web design, web hosting, search engine optimization, etc. Instead of sticking your link partner at the bottom of every page, put their website in the category that relates to the services he/she provides. Create a link box at the top of those pages and place several quality links to websites that fall under those categories. This will bring your link partners a lot of traffic and encourage your partners to do the same, thus bringing quality traffic to your website, as well.
  4. Do not do homepage or site-wide link exchange, at least with the same anchor text. Homepage is not necessarily going to bring you the most traffic or at least the best traffic.
  5. Amount of traffic is not as important as its quality. If you are running online store, all you should care about is turning traffic into paying customers. Not all traffic can be converted, even if there is lots of it. Right link exchange techniques can bring you quality traffic effects of which you will see when looking at your ROI.
Remember to treat every link exchange as a strategic partnership. Think about your link exchange partners’ benefit, as well as your own and then sit back and watch your incoming QUALITY links bring you more and more traffic from month to month!