Loading ...Link Exchanges, Good or Evil?
Almost Every webmaster knows about link exchanges, but sometimes they are not sure on how much they affect their website. In this article I will show what is a Link exchange, and what are the negatives, and the positives from them.
What are Link Exchanges?
The title says it all. Link Exchange is when a webmaster agrees with another webmaster to give each other backlinks. For example, I would talk to john chow, and I would ask him for a link exchange, if he says yes, then I would put a link from his site on my website, and he would do the same.
It doesn’t matter where the link is placed, as long as you are getting a reciprocal link.
The reason people do link Exchanges, is primarily to gain more traffic, and secondly to gain a better Page Rank.
It is not 100% known how Google calculates the Page Rank of a certain website, but it is said that they count the backlinks that a certain website page has. So for Example, If I would have 1 person linking to this article, Google would rank this page as a PR 1 (obviously this is false, as it takes way more links) and let’s say my homepage has 10 backlinks, then my homepage would have a Page Rank of 10. The reason for this, is because Google calculates the rank per page, they don’t give the same rank for every page of a Domain, so your homepage might have a PR of 6 and your articles might not even be ranked. That’s why people often seek for link exchanges in order to get more Rank, even though Pagerank is completely useless, and people only use it to sell ads because it makes their site look more ‘valuable’ or more ‘important’.
The Good, and The bad
Like I said before, there are many good things and bad things that you can get from backlinks, and here are the good ones:
- More traffic
- Better Pagerank
- Better Rank in other sites such as Technorati
- Gain webmaster friends by giving them free links.
- Make money from link exchanges as You can charge for them.
Now here is the bad
- Google doesn’t like link exchanges
- You won’t really be getting the links, so it won’t feel as good as if you earned it.
- Your site might be penalized.
- You will loose your Pagerank if caught
- You might loose your own readers
As you can see, the good outweighs the bad… It’s up to you whether you want to risk your domain’s position for certain keywords. John Chow had that happen to him once, but it didn’t affect him as he didn’t depend on Google for his traffic. And as a result of getting penalized by Google, he ended up getting more viewers and gaining more money.
Here is the full article about John Chow’s fall on Google. I find it funny because he doesn’t even appear in the first 2 pages for his name.
Now just because that article says that John Chow didn’t get affected by Google, does not mean that you won’t. John Chow is an excellent blogger and he didn’t need Google, as his majority of traffic did not come from there, John Chow had links from other places such as Yahoo, and other search engines, Plus he advertises his website in other ways, such as putting ads on other people’s sites, and since his articles are so good, he gets backlinks just by making a post.
If you are looking for a place to get a reciprocal link, then here is a website specialized in Link exchanges that you might want to look into, but like I said before don’t get caught.
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I actually exchanged links with someone, or I really:
asked them if I could put a link to them on my site, they said sure and that they would link to me. Now some of those links are by accident, if two people link to each other but don’t say they are going to.
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