@james 162736 wrote:
I´m confused ..
… there are loads of people, including myself, who spend little or no time on link exchanges. And yet there´s whole hosts of offers out there for link exchanges.
I think it’s because …
1) There are a lot of low quality “SEO Experts” out there that are still pushing the idea that a link is a link is a link and doing “link” generation for people who have more money than sense.
“Pay me $500 and I’ll get you 100 social network links” (etc).
:sarcasm:
2) There are newbies who are reading generic advice that’s 2-3-5 years old that says getting link numbers up is improtant for GOOGLE to find and index your site (this has not been true since sitemaps began).
:sarcasm:
These days I add about 1 link a month – only to sites that I’ve read and enjoyed – and I don’t really care about a reciprocal link at all.
But that seems to be so rare amongst the torrent of paid link offers, and spammy 3-way link exchanges that no-one really believes that links are now put up on merit alone.
The whole IDEA of link popularity and PR and getting massive numbers of links is dead (or should be). The net is a business medium now – and links are usually advertising purchases. Google knows this and it’s why PR is a bit of a valueless metric.
Link to quality content – it pays off in the long run.