Are "Links" Pages Worth It

[riverbirch]

Hi,

I got an email from a site wishing to exchange links with a site of mine. I've incorporated them into my sites in the past but don't any more. I had a site few years ago which had around 3000 backlinks, not a great deal but decent, only 25 were from a "useful links" page. Why invite my users to leave my site?

Is there a benefit from them I'm missing?

Any Thoughts?

[dimareli]

You need to choose carefully all websites with wich you exchange links.

Never exchange links with websites with low PR, not related websites or with link farms.

If the website that asked you is related and with a PR of 4 thank i think you can benefit in Google rankings

[DrTandem1]

Why invite my users to leave my site?

Is there a benefit from them I'm missing?

Any Thoughts?

Because your site would become a resource. The reciprocal site would also become a resource and be inviting their visitors to visit your site. If they are using your links because they didn't find what they wanted at your site, then they are going to leave anyway. It's kind of like going to a store and asking the clerk for something. They tell you they don't have it, but to try such-and-such a store.

It helps the visitor and it gives you a heads-up as to what your visitors may be expecting from your site.

[Big Juice]

The Internet was designed for sites/pages to link together and if no one were to link then there wouldn't be an Internet.

If you build a proper directory and faithfully maintian it then you can and will benefit from the linking contained within.

Why would you invite users to leave your site - because your site is so awesome that you know they will be back especially when you helped them find what they were looking for.

AS to PR... who cares as long as the linking page has been indexed and there are not too many links on it. The thing about PR is that it will grow as the page matures and the links contained will also become more valuable as they age.

[pahalik]

You need to choose carefully all websites with wich you exchange links.

Never exchange links with websites with low PR, not related websites or with link farms.

If the website that asked you is related and with a PR of 4 thank i think you can benefit in Google rankings

NOBODY starts with high PR. Not even Google had high PR when they started, or YouTube, etc..

Link what's relevant to your site and forget about what some search engine thinks.

[marci11]

AS to PR... who cares as long as the linking page has been indexed and there are not too many links on it. The thing about PR is that it will grow as the page matures and the links contained will also become more valuable as they age.

Couldn't agree more with this point! Thank you for putting it out there for people to think about! Page Rank shouldn't matter anymore, I mean Google is disregarding their standards for it anyway, so why should it matter to the webmasters?

As to links pages, I firmly believe that as long as you have quality content pages (like a business page for business-related sites), then exchanging links is an awesome tool! It will boost your website, as it appears to SERPs as 'hey this website must be important if this other website is linking to it.' It will help your rankings and SEO if you use the proper anchor text along with the URL you'd like to boost. Use your specific keywords that you'd like them to point to your URL. Obviously a one-way link would be the best you could ask for, but reciprocal links are easier to get from other sites, especially when they have relative content! Make sure there are no cheating tactics going on before you agree to link swap, like check robots.txt file, check for nofollows, noindexes, etc. I know for a fact that link exchanging is still one of the most important aspects in SEO, I've seen all of the sites I manage go up in rankings. The best system I have found to manage links, if you're interested, is Lavalinx.

So, yes I fully support links pages, as long as they have relative content written on the page and you link within relative content pages on other websites.

[riverbirch]

thanks for the feedback

[deepsand]

The Internet was designed for sites/pages to link together and if no one were to link then there wouldn't be an Internet.

You seem to have mistaken the Web for the Internet, when in fact they are 2 quite different things.

The Internet is a data communications network which predates the Web.

The HTTP Protocol, upon which the Web is built, is but one of many Protocols supported by the Internet.

[maemae]

Very Good Points. Always Exchange with quality websites where the traffic coming from the other website could be Beneficial to Both parties with potential customers.

[datetopia]

Make sure the links are relevant to page contents and not added only on the idea of "I link you, you link me or you pay me, I link you". In example a page about important search engines should have links to google, yahoo, live. They will probably not link back but your page will have decent valuable links. Then you can also add your friend's search engine and he can give you a backlink.