Will link exchanges really help you?

[thefandango]

Your SEO company wants to build reciprocal links through a mass-links page?

The answer is really, really simple.

Sack your SEO company.

[deepsand]

Which is the more important : where, on the originating site, the OBLs reside; or, where, on the target site, the target pages are located?

And, for what reason(s) your answer?

[claybutler]

For Webmerlin what I mean by big ticket item are ones that require some sophistication and work but have a big payoff.

An example of this would be writing a really great article (with appropriate anchor text) that gets published on a high profile site.

Or creating something with strong viral potential.

Or getting your product or service reviewed in an authority review website.

Or creating great niche content that's worth linking to and then promoting is on social networking sites.

Or personally contacting other high quality, non competing sites and fining out if there is a way you can help each other out. For instance, by giving them a natural anchor text link in your website's body copy in exchange for yours. So a mortgage broker in your town may link to you (a real estate agent) as an agent of choice and you to them as a broker of choice. This not only helps ranking but helps generate leads.

Lesser stuff is submitting to the hundred of little directories that no one really visits, blog posts, and the basic easy stuff.

Nothing wrong with the basic easy stuff, just don't pay a lot for it or spend too much time on it. And the way to do that is to work with an individual, not an SEO company.

You can find these freelancers all over the place. Find a good one a get a good working relationship going.

Deepsand is correct about designing for users but there's no reason not to do both. For example, a photographers portfolio that just had ten great images linking to each other in a simple slide show, with no page text, would be great for users because people can see and make all kinds of judgments based upon the quality of the images. A search engine just sees a bunch of jpgs linked together.

Good SEO is the technique of explaining art to a robot.

[TechEvangelist]

A link exchange will probably not do very much good. Reciprocal links have long been believed by many in the SEO industry to cancel each other out. One-way links from an industry-related site are always the best.

I agree with the comments about link pages. It would be very difficult for you to find a link page with a significant number of links that has not been penalized by Google with a gray-barred PageRank. They do this to discourage link pages. Take a look at what Google did to the inner pages in directories.

[deepsand]

A link exchange will probably not do very much good. Reciprocal links have long been believed by many in the SEO industry to cancel each other out. One-way links from an industry-related site are always the best.

Consider that reciprocal links are no more than two one-way links.

I agree with the comments about link pages. It would be very difficult for you to find a link page with a significant number of links that has not been penalized by Google with a gray-barred PageRank. They do this to discourage link pages. Take a look at what Google did to the inner pages in directories.

A gray ToolBar PR is not a penalty.

Next, consider that the purpose of a link page is not to gain a high PR for such, but for user convenience; and, that the purpose of links is to gain traffic.

Now, think about the question raised at http://www.webproworld.com/search-en...tml#post470481

[robdale]

Link exchange is a good way to build backlinks, but it is known as a blackhat technique. If you are able to get one way link then i think it will be worth, as will be able to save your valuable traffic. Also, do exchange with the sites which are relevant to your niche. Non-relevant sites can't give you any benefit they are just not worth of.

[webmarketinggroup]

My experience is that reciprocal linking (what I have understood as your exchanges) does not really work. Finding genuine relevance and shared interests is hard and time consuming with little rub back to you.

Quality beats quantity, cherry pick sites that you would like to link to you. Be specific in what you want, get good quality inbound links.

[deepsand]

Link exchange is a good way to build backlinks, but it is known as a blackhat technique.

Blackhat?

Please explain.

Non-relevant sites can't give you any benefit they are just not worth of.

Increased traffic is not beneficial?

[deepsand]

My experience is that reciprocal linking (what I have understood as your exchanges) does not really work.

Might not that be an effect of the links in question, as opposed to the reciprocity?

Finding genuine relevance and shared interests is hard and time consuming ...

As is the case with all things of value.

[TechEvangelist]

Consider that reciprocal links are no more than two one-way links.

By simple definition, two one-way links are not one-way links at all.

A gray ToolBar PR is not a penalty.

A gray Toolbar PageRank is not a penalty for a new page, but when Google assigns "less than zero" PageRank to a mature page so that it cannot be used to pass PageRank, it is indeed a penalty. That did not happen to directory pages until AFTER Google announced their program to penalize sites that sell links. A gray toolbar returns a PageRank value of -1. For a mature page, either the page is being penalized or it is not inheriting any value from other links to the page.

Next, consider that the purpose of a link page is not to gain a high PR for such, but for user convenience; and, that the purpose of links is to gain traffic.

You might gain some traffic from a good directory with good traffic, but you are not likely to gain much traffic from a link page in most sites. Most people put link pages in their sites and exchange reciprocal links because they are operating under the misconception that they are good for their search engine rankings.