Link Exchanges – the novice version
Draft
Link exchanges are one of the processes you have to embrace to get your site noticed on that big old web. Ideally you’d never have to do it because your content would be sooo good that people would link to lots of your pages just because they’re great. Nice idea but for most of us that just isn’t going to happen. Instead we have to make it happen.
Making it happen
You can build your site’s popularity in the search engines by a number of means – both good, bad and iffy. I’d recommend taking the good means every time. So it may take longer, it may take more work, atleast you won’t be fretting everytime the search engines decide to change their algorthms that you’ll be penalised. They all have different ways of assessing your site but by taking a conservative route you’ll meet all their requirements and not trip over any of the gotchas.
If you find yourself needing to read the Google Patent to try and stay on the right side then you need to pull back, reconsider your priorities and remember that it’s not that hard!
This article deals with link exchanges and not general SEO principles but the mindset is the same.
White Hat Link Exchanges
- Links between sites where there is endorsement of the others business
- Links between sites where there is no endorsement of the others business
- Links between a directory and a site
Black Hat Link Exchanges
- Links where one party creates invalid links back – either by using robots.txt, javascript or redirects
- Links where one party uses a valueless subdomain to hold the links
- Links where one party uses a third party to manage and publish the links
- Links where one party insists on a banner on your home page in order to list deep within their site (more)
- Referral Spam
Themed links
Even if your site has only one page, it has a theme. Identify the theme.
This site is a technical site. Because I’ve added personal stuff into the blog, and the fact that the sites I’ve worked on tend to be property investment related has made it a bit muddled. But if you have a site representing your business it will have a theme. It’s real estate, or engineering, or law.
Link only to sites related to your theme. Find a discrete little page to link back to the sites that have helped you technically if you want but make that a minor part of your links section.
And don’t use the word links if you can help it 
This may leave you cold but you need a database to manage your links.
You will find plenty of directory scripts that you can use such as wsnlinks and lma and there are others that use text files rather than real databases.
Bite the bullet and pay someone to set it up if you need to. You’ll be grateful later when you have hundreds of links to check and maintain.
Make the first move
When you visit a page that you want to link to you will often get rebuffed if your home page has less than PR4. Perservere – it’s a catch-22.
- Find partners that will allow you to link.
- Find forums dealing with your pet subject. Only participate if they will let you have a signature (more) and make some useful (not spammy) posts.
- Finding New Links
* Themed links
* Spammy links
* Traps
* When to be generous - Marking links as recipricol
- Processing link request emails (more)
- Checking link exchange forums
Administration of your directory
- Checking recipricol links
- Checking duplicate links
- Checking dead links
- Breaking categories up
Information about link exchanging has been written before, will be written again and I don’t really want to “recreate the wheel” but I get questions so I thought I’d put together my thoughts as a resource. The links contained are pages which may hold extra information which may be of use.
