Advice on Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are cool, and this forum is a great place to get in touch with people to exchange links but, I thought I would offer some basic but worthwhile advice to ease the link exchanging process.

Page Rank is not a guide - Sorry but I need to link to sites PR4 or higher is a waste of words, PR has no influence on where you appear in SERP (search engine results page), Linking to lower PR sites does not decrease your ranking, and any tool your using to work out your PR is wrong! Google uses PR as a very loose guide to the level of inbound links to a site, it is not a reflection of quality or a mark of experience.

Page Strength is a guide - Page strength is all the things people think PR is. It is a guide both to popularity and relative importance of a page along with its potential impact on SERPs at the current time. When asking for link exchanges use Page strength no Page rank to determine your page strength visit SEOmoz page strength tool don't be disheartened if the number is lower then your PR (nearly every ones is)

However Page ranking/strength changes, so don't worry to much about either, its the site your interested in, does it have potential visitors, if the site looks and feels wrong then its page rank/strength is irrelevant.

Reciprocal or 3 way linking - When working our a link exchange you should be prepared if a person asks wether your interested in reciprocal or 3 way linking. Reciprocal linking is where 2 sites link to each other directly it is what most link exchanges are about. 3 way linking is when you have 3 web sites (often 2 belong to one person, one the other) they each link to once site so A -> B -> C -> A. The principle behind this is that Google gives much more validity to one way non reciprocal links (this has yet to be proven, though Google algorithm can spot interlinked link farms a mile off so they do have some sort of checking) for more information check out this wikipedia article and SEObook entry on whether 3 way link exchanges are a good idea

Relative Links - Presuming your linking to sites within your own field where will the links be placed, within relevant content? or on a links page, or sidebar. The most prized links are those that sit within relative content, so links within the page of content, much like the links within this forum post, second most prized are links in sidebars on certain pages (particularly home page) least prized are link pages, which do not provide any real relevancy and are often not included in Google except in supplemental results. When asking for link exchanges make sure you know where you are going to put the link and vice versa.

Check the site before agreeing - Check the site your linking to, is it somewhere you want to be associated with, things to avoid are MFA (made for adsense) and other here today gone tomorrows sites, overly adverts, sites using pop ups etc. If your not comfortable then don't agree to link until they make changes, rememmber you will have reasons to say no, tell them as they may have no idea what's wrong.

No to no follow - This is an obvious one make sure niether party uses no follow attribute on link exchanges, you are offering an association with the site so the use of no follow is hardly appropriate in such cases.

Time limits & review - Agree a minimum time the links should be up, and also suggest a review date, after a month or two to see if the exchange is working.

Nice advices. Thread is now sticky ;)

I will strongly agree that 3 way linking is the best way to exchange links because search engines will not "realize" that there is an exchange between the sites so the ranking will be better.

Pagerank is not much, but when you get a high pagerank from quality links (from relevant web sites) you are on a very good way ;)

yes thats a great guide ! thanks...

I think a PR higher then 5 is also a good indicator about the quality of a website (right that's not a rule).

I think checking  the page strength is a good an fast way to "judge" about link partner.

BTW do you write this guides especially for webdigity?

yep its a webdigity unique classic :)

finalwebsites.com is one of them:



 :(

Don't worry remember its a totally different index to PR and most sites have a lower score.

That's why I like you so much :)

BTW webdigity has 4.5 page strength. I wouldn't expect that :)

hehe great Nick,

I'm sure that a MFA site will never have a good page strength but sometimes good websites have a lower value than others, in my case:

finalwebsites has a 3.5 and has around 600-800 visitors a day from Google (good SEO and content) while my template shop has a value of 4 and only 100 visitors a day

but sure all together are good indecators

I agree with most of the points raised, but I would not altogether throw out PagRank.  Becasue PageRank is logorithmis (am I using the right word?), PR1 and 2 are almost worth nothing, whereas PR4 is worth perhaps dozens of times what PR2 is.  And PageRank of accumulated links does count.

That being said, if a page is highly relevant, I don't hesitate to to accept link swaps even from PR0 pages if the page is a_ indexed or b) likely to send real traffic.

With regard to 2-way vs 3-way, I am not sure it really matters if your link campaign is broad (swaps, articles, social bookmarking, blogging, directories, etc.)  It might play more of a factor if your website is heavily dependend on link swaps, but I can't help but think that Google tracks websites that appear to be gaming them by an overreliance on 3-way link exchanges.

Throw out page rank, any page rank your seeing is up to 6 months out of date, so its only an indicator of things in the past, it has no relevance what so ever to anything other then an internal (Google) system for links and they are the only people who know your current PR and what the value is actually for. I'm not saying don't include it in your proposal but only because there are still people out there under the belief that page rank is some how useful to work out whether you should link to a site.

It really does need to be re-emphasised that it has nothing to do with how relevant or the quality of a link. You would be better of getting a PR0 link in your subject then a PR10 in a completely separately subject. PR has a place in some areas but link building is one area where you just need to ignore it,

The biggest flaw that many forget when chasing links with pre-existing PR is that 3, 6, 9 or even 12 months down the road today's PR0 could become tomorrow's PR6.

I don't consider PR when deciding to exchange links. With my directory, many of the sites being submitted are on the newer side. The trick is to use your gut feel when deciding the potential value of a link to or from a site. I'd much rather have a link from/to a weakly designed but useful site than one that has perfect markup and just feels scummy somehow.

Nice post. Thanks for sharing this information :)

checked one of my free-hosted hobby sites and this is what came up...

 

personally, i dont exchange links. i prefer one-way incoming links.

I think everyone does... :D

great this high page strength result!

i cant make that thing work. i dont have much experience with those tags...

I fixed it for you )

actually a lot of the values in this test are based on the domain name and not on the URL, sorry man but this rank is fake :D

i know that man... still the full url has 337 incoming links and i dont know where they came from. i remember submitting to only less than 10 directories and others (i cant remember anymore)before and thats it.

and thanks for fixing that logo for me!

I think it's a google thing ;)

It looks like someone unstickied that thread.

Now it is again sticky as it is valuable to all people who do link exchanges ;)

I feel like I am playing devil's advocate, as I am usually the one telling people not to worry too much about pageRank, but don't you think this is a bit of an exaggeration?

If I could get a link from http://www.adobe.com/ for any site I'm working on, that would be worht more than dozens of links from almost disconnected sites, regardless of how relevant.

maybe right, but just in case your website is not about the content from adobe but about "medicines", I'm sure that the number of visitors from the adobe website will be bigger then from the google SERP's

But its not PR at work here but brand, you see the reason for getting a link is visitor number based on trust nothing to do with PR, I can get a PR 7 site without an issue and sell you links, but it will not increase your visitor numbers! getting a link from adobe will increase your visitor numbers simply because people use it. But the point stands if adobe was dropped from Google index tongiht and given a PR 0 it would be worth more then PR 10 link with no traffic and no relativity.

I think pagerank is still the strongest debate among webmasters :)

There is a very strong fact that can lead us to the truth, the SERPs. As anyone can see there are many times low pr sites in the top results. That means that pagerank has nothing to do with relevancy.

Of course there are many pros on having high pagerank. For instance sites with high pagerank are getting indexed faster. Also you can easily sell/trade links when you have high pagerank and this is mostly because the average webmaster is "chasing" high pagerank.

The bottom line is that pagerank is a always a good sign, but it is not a success factor.

with a link from a PR7 or 8 site, a new site can get indexed within 24 hours.

not only with this high PR values, a well structured PR4 or 5 website will do the same...

Again its nothing to do with PR, you get a link to a high PR directory you will find no increase in crawling time, however you link to a high volume mid PR site that regularly changes its content, and you will be crawled quickly.

The crawl speed is determined by the number of visitors to the content update speed, PR once again has nothing to do with it! Again a high volume quickly changing site that links to you will increase the speed your site is crawled the first time irrelevant of PR it can have a PR of 0!

high volume meaning high traffic?

high volume normally refers to high quantity of visitor impressions rather then unique traffic, but the two normally go hand in hand.

Sorry to bring the subject up again (moderators advice me if I should have opened a new thread)

But page strength (PS from now on) tool either does not work well or it does not work well with my site (or on my end)
example http://hausfay.com (http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength/hausfay.com )
I see a PS 2.5
and I see 0 Y.Links on Full URL and on domain
and I see 1 G.Link 
and 0 DMOZ links
which are all wrong

since when you click on siteexplorer links it gives me more than 100 links in each case and I know for fact that it has 1 Dmoz link  ?

Anybody can confirm/explain these numbers ?

maybe the pages are down? or they use diff. datacenters? check the backlinks via the tool in my signature (Your websites rank?)

It would appear Yahoo API is currently down ;) notice all the 0s are coming from Yahoo I ran a quick test (using my little python script) and also encountered problems so its not just SEOMoz guess this is the problem with mashups

Hmm, sometimes Curl is better than an API :P

CURL is fine until they change the page in some way ;)