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I’m no SEO expert (unlike a few of the affiliates out there who I’m sure could make a decent living on the SEO front alone), but it was interesting to hear the SEO discussion at CAP Euro back in January where there was a little disagreement amongst the panel.
The general argument went along the way that it’s quality rather than quantity of links that is now important in SERPS.
Maybe that’s why some established sites don’t appear to spend too much time on link exchanging?
I link exchange purely with associates that I know have quality sites and condtent. I DO NOT exchange with people who email me because after tracking them over the years, I have found that about 95% of those exchanges go towards helping out BH spammers. For example, you get a link-back on their WH website, which feeds (gives link juice to) their network of stolen content.
So, since I did my research and that was my conclusion – I don’t bother answering. I sometimes link exchange with members at CAP/GPWA if I feel they have quality sites.
Otherwise, I don’t worry about it. Good content will win out in the end.
@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.
I get so many requests for link exchanges I don’t even read any of them at all.
I consider links to be what google intended them to be – a vote for a site I think to be exceptionally good, or a way for my visitors to access additional, pertinent information.
Google is fickle and no matter what you do, you will go up and down. IMO, the worst thing one can do in the long run is to try to trick it.
I built my site for visitors, and they thank me for it by coming around whether I am on page 1 or page 5. For me, page one means accelerated growth, page 5 to 10 means continued profitablility.
So I keep clean and ride it out and it works for me.
There are business models based on links and they do seem to work for some people. So I am not saying it can’t be done.
I just prefer to cater to my visitors and make sure they find me a valuable resource, bookmark me and keep coming back. That allows me to ride out the ups and downs of this business.
