Link Exchange:

One of many methods of procuring link s to one’s website . By contacting the webmaster of another website – preferably of a related subject but not a direct competitor – one can offer to place a link to his on one’s own site. In exchange he is to place a link back on his site. These are then called reciprocal links. In most cases those reciprocal links are placed on a link directory page especially made up for link exchange purposes.

The idea behind exchanging links is generating traffic by

1. visitors who directly click on one’s link on a link partner site and

2. increasing one’s own link popularity by exchanging links with as many sites as possible and thereby improve one’s position on the SERPs
   

The value of exchanging links has decreased over the recent years out of several reasons:

• Google  doesn’t give credit for reciprocal links anymore. Therefore having a lot of reciprocal links in one’s link directory or on other website pages doesn’t help the Google rankings anymore. Yahoo and MSN may follow on this route.

• Many webmasters have come to just ignoring email requests to exchange links and consider offers in this direction as spam .

• When webmasters create their link directory only with the purpose to improve their search engine rankings they mostly don’t try to really provide a valuable directory of useful websites as a resource for their visitors. It degenerates to a sometimes endless list of random links (you can see an example under “Link Farm”). The traffic from such a link directory to the sites listed there will be close to zero.

• Building a directory which search engine spiders  may classify as a Link Farm or having a reciprocal link to a Link Farm on one’s website can get the site penalized or banned completely by the search engines.

But if one neither gets traffic from being listed in link directories nor does it help one’s search engine rankings why bother at all and waste time an effort on finding and contacting potential link partners?

However, link exchange is not dead and several successful internet marketers still rely on it as one part of their effort to create a strong network of links throughout the web thereby making their traffic less susceptible to search engine algorithm- or policy changes. If done right it still can be a source of consistent traffic. The main point of doing it right is concentrating on quality rather than quantity. Working on having one’s link placed on ONE high quality and high traffic site – maybe even integrated in the page content – can be a thousand times more valuable than having one’s link dumped in the nowhere of thousands of low quality link directories.

[Link comes from Old Danish lænkia = chain;

Exchange comes from Vulgar Latin excambiare , ex- = out and cambiare = to barter]

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