Reciprocal Link Exchanges - Are they Useless?
Looks like Google isn’t so hot on taking out websites that use link exchange programs like GotHits (My how things change…I posted this a few days ago and the company is out of business already).
Now, for those of you who don’t know my history, I started out using programs like this. In fact, I was going to JV with the man who wrote the InfoWizards Reciprocal link program.
I eventually decided to pass on that but what I found while messing around with all of those link exchange programs is that they are mostly a waste of your time.
Yes, you can certainly get thousands of backlinks to your site and even make yourself look like a big competitor.
For instance, I was searching for the term earning money google search box in WordZe and did a wordrank lookup on it out of curiosity.
Now, a domain with over 27,000 links in the SEO realm - and one I don’t recognize - makes me wonder what’s up! I opened up SEO Elite so I could take a look at this guy’s backlinks.
So if this guy has thousands of backlinks from programs like this, why wouldn’t I recommend them?
Great question! And here are my reasons:
- The links are usually worthless. Let’s face it, the people that are using these are typically SEO newbies. They often don’t realize that the links are not going to be quality links at all. That is, they will usually have bunches of links that are allegedly categorized (in some cases they won’t be) and simply small tidbits of text right after the link.
- They’re not ‘natural’. That is, it’s rather easy for the search engines to detect these types of links and discount them rather heavily.
- If you are going out and begging for links from webmasters you’re wasting your time. There are plenty of other activities that you could do to get many more links to your sites and this isn’t one of them.
- All of the links go straight to your web page. Think of it like a pyramid with everything pointing to the top. What you want is for the links to be spread throughout your website. The second type of linking will get you plenty more traffic than the first will. Not only that, you’re also less likely to get any penalizations from those incoming links.
Yes, I used them in the past. I might use them in the future. But the only case I would do so would be for black hat type of stuff when I need the search engines to find and index my content quickly. And in those cases, I’m hurting more than helping those people who have joined those programs.
Thus, I recommend you stay away from them.
As a sidenote, I’m rather surprised that Google hasn’t hurt the pagerank of http://www.money-adsense.com/. As much as Matt Cutts has preached about the evilness (is that really a word? it doesn’t matter - I like it!) of link programs, they still seem to slip through the cracks at times.
G-Man
P.S. Reciprocal link exchanges often end up with stupid e-mails or telemarketers from India calling you too!.
3 Responses
[…] This blog, titled Look What G-Man Found looks to be an up and coming blog on marketing, he has several categories on tactics, like Whits hat, Black Hat, Affiliate marketing, and more. Once he fixes the header I can see his site becoming very popular. One of my favorite categories is about White Hat Marketing, with only about four posts in it right now, some of them are very informative. I spend at least an hour (usually more) browsing such sites on marketing, and have learned alot. There are two types of marketing, ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ and while he does have a few methods on Black Hat, I try to stick with the white hat method. While not all black hat marketing is bad, it can get tricky, anyway; his article on Reciprocal Link Exchanges - Are they Useless? Some good info in there. He isn’t talking about the swapping of links between two people, he is talking about the sites that you can register on and quickly get a ton of links to your site, these are really worthless in the long run, as you don’t know where your links are going. […]
January 9th, 2007 |
Hey its a fact! Even I experienced this a few days ago. My website was having page rank 6 and I wanted to make it 8 so I started link exchange on huge scale. But to my bad luck I placed link of some link exchange website in terms of Google link farming website in my website. And at a sudden my websites page rank turned 4.Trust me avoid links from all pharmacy websites and link exchange software websites they are just doing link farming. Google hates this.
January 18th, 2007 |
One suggestion to You, Donot make so lengthy urls. The url of this page is actually not known to searchengines. They generally donot accept so long urls.Donot make frames to fool people. People are smart enough.
January 18th, 2007 |