Key Points in Exchanging Links

A lot of webmasters will tell you to never exchange links, I’m not one of those webmasters. I think it’s a great way to drive traffic to your site and get indexed in the search engines. Problems come in when you do too many link exchanges or you get backlinks from crummy websites.

Lets talk about getting backlinks from crummy websites for a second. First off, you never want to exchange links with off-topic sites. Always exchange links with websites that are related to your niche. What I really want to touch on though is other Webmasters trying to trick you. Don’t ever exchange links with a website that only has a few articles, has a bunch of links on it, and looks like a spammy site. This is just an old webmaster trick, while they’ll give you a backlink on their spammy site, they’ll make you link to one of their high quality sites. A lot of this goes on in Webmaster forums such as Digital Point, V7N, and Sitepoint. This is an evil method and I despise a lot of webmasters for doing this. It’s not a black hat method, but it’s almost just as bad.

I always do frontpage or sitewide link exchanges. If a webmaster tries and gives you a subpage backlink, don’t even bother. See when a link is on a frontpage, you can get a lot of traffic by just people clicking on the link. It doesn’t give you much page rank anymore, but overall it will send traffic to your site and help search engines recognize you for indexing, especially if you have a new website.

Also watch out for nofollow links. It doesn’t happen much, but some webmasters will give you a backlink on their site that is nofollow. A good way to detect this is use an add-on from Firefox called SearchStatus. When you enable it, go to the bottom right corner and hit the right button on your mouse once. Small box will pop up, pick highlight nofollow links. Now all the nofollow links on any website page will show up as a pink box. Or you can just highlight the link text and check out the source code. You can do that with your right button on your mouse again.

I hope all these key points help you out. Some of it maybe common sense I know, but if you’re new to the webmaster game, this can be very precious information!