A recent CNET article about link exchanges got picked up by CNN.com. The article referenced them as the “poor man’s SEO” which is accurate in the sense that they are a low budget way of getting site links. Unfortunately, most of the savvier “poor men” have also abandoned link exchanges because they are not effective. If you read the entire article, you will even see that link exchange is not a recommended method of optimization. Given that link exchange practices have been devalued for several years, posting an article like this one is akin to recommending adjustable rate mortgages as the “poor man’s path to home ownership.”
Until about October of 2005, link exchanges were a great way of improving link popularity and PageRank. (Note that PageRank is not an effective measurement of rankings because link popularity needs to be tied to relevance to be useful.) You could use off-the-shelf software or a service to solicit link exchanges, and they would be posted on your site through a dynamic script. Usually the links would appear on a page called “links” or “resources.” Some of the smarter and less ethical people running exchanges would use rules to ensure that the search engine did not see the link listing on their own site, so all the links would appear to be “one way” links, which have more value. The October 2005 update to Google left a lot of people without search engine rankings because their entire linking strategy involved link exchanges, so they suddenly noticed a drop in search engine traffic right before Christmas. SEO conspiracy theorists everywhere once again noted that this was the perfect excuse for Google to make money off Adwords for anyone running an ecommerce site that depended on search traffic.
By the way, if you are still running non-relevant links on your site through outdated links pages, you should probably delete them from your site. Removing the link to a link exchange pages does not take them out of the search engine listings, since the engine already knows where the page is, and no longer needs navigational help finding it. If you have people in your field who are worth linking to, you can always create a specialized page called “partners” or “related sites” with those links. Trading links with relevant sites and linking to resources is a good way to make your site look like a better resource.
As the article mentioned, many people find out about link exchanges through emails. Most of these emails are poorly written, or come from a template, and start out with sentences like “I saw your site on …” If you’ve gotten an email like this, you should know that several hundred other sites like yours got the same one, so you may as well ignore it. Most link exchange software starts by scraping top results in search engines for a word or phrase, then spidering relevant sites for email addresses. They then send out mass emails to all of the webmaster emails on the list, dynamically inserting your site name into the body of the message.
Some link exchange emails propose 3 or 4 way link exchanges, but usually these are the most suspect. In exchange for a low quality link from a questionable web directory, you are expected to send a high quality link from your site to someone else. In almost every case, you are getting less than you are giving. Third party linking can still potentially be discovered by search engines, but the value of the link to you probably isn’t worth penalizing. Even so, there are some theories about “co-citation” where your site may be getting defined by links from other sites, so you are better off not taking the risk.
As a disclaimer, we wanted to point out that link exchanges don’t necessarily get you penalized, but they aren’t well known for adding value. When people lost ranking in 2005 due to Google’s Jagger Update, they thought that a penalty was in place, but search engine penalties tend to do more than just take away link value. It turned out that the value of exchanged links dropped to near zero, and people who had diversified linking strategies were able to recover quickly, or even excel against competitors who were getting all of their site rankings from link exchanges. Any linking strategy should include various link sources, in the event that one channel or link group becomes discredited as time goes on. Even if you rely on 100% white hat linking, you can still take a hit in the search engines if your inbound link sources lose their own value, so you should make sure your white hat link building does not depend on a single method.
If you have a limited budget but still need search engine optimization for your website, there are better ways to spend your money. When it comes to SEO, you may want to acknowledge that link exchanges are the “poor man’s optimization” because you will be just about as poor tomorrow as you are today if you don’t invest in good search engine optimization. Good links from places like the Yahoo Directory, Business.com, and recognized directories are a great first step that cost about the same as link exchange software. If you shop around, a search engine optimization agency (like ours, the Web.com Search Agency) can get you started on SEO with growth in mind, so you can concentrate on a limited set of keywords and funnel your revenue growth back into search marketing. In any case, using an outdated SEO method is not recommended since it may not hurt your rankings, but it won’t do anything for them either.
