Florida SEO Marketing Firm > Link Exchanges

Link Exchanges

A link exchange is a website or community that enables individual webmasters to connect with eachother in order to exchange recipricol links between their websites or become involved with three-way linking.

The link exchange was a popular web 1.0 search engine promotion method to increase search rank and improve your websites search engine placement. In more recent years the popularity of link exchanges remains high, while their true effectiveness has come into question.

Perpetuated now greatly in lore, it's easy to find out-dated internet marketing guides around the internet that tout recipricol linking and link exchange websites. Many of the link exchange websites themselves promote their services as the solution to internet marketing.

The reality is that the search engines have long since viewed link exchanges as an attempt to game the system. While these tactics do survive in areas of the web for instance, MSN Live Search Engine Optimization techniques, by and large the link exchange is a risky proposition for a web marketer.

Is a Link Exchange between two websites useless?

No. If you are linking to a website that you feel would be of genuine interest to your visitors, and they just happen to link to you there is nothing wrong with that. Two websites with similar or compliemntary themes will provide a benefit (albeit a smaller one then a one way link).

Of course it's always possible to signup for many link exchanges, then use scripting, rel=nofollow, or other nefarious methods to ensure you stay on the positive side of said link exchange.

Of course that would not bode well for your reputation online and word does tend to spread in time. In the meantime, keep that in mind next time someone eagerly offers you a link that seems too good to be true. The backlink that exists to you today, may not be there 3 weeks from now.