Understanding Link Exchanges

The original idea behind Link Exchange programs was that site owners would visit “broker” site and agree to exchange links with another site and raise traffic for both. Over time the way this worked evolved

How is the linking done ?

In the early days , back links were done manually and some exchanges still work this way. A specific set up the links as quickly as they should. Other Link Exchange systems use automated link exchange. This is great for getting many more links – often, the service automatically builds and maintains the link list – but they are not relevant and can lose the hosting site valuable traffic

Where the link is located on your website

Some systems require that you place a link to the target on your site. Others systems require that you put a few linesof html code on your site that goes to the exchange and sources a banner. This is easier to set up but not so useful advantageousif you need back links as the only site linking back to you is the exchange

How the back links link to each other

Most links that are set up manually are one-to-one – you link to your partner and he links back. Links though a central server are many-to-many – your site may link to many others and they will link to you. As well as this, there are manual multi-way exchanges where you link to site A, Site A links to site B, B to C and C back to you. These look less obvious to the search engines’ back links assessment algorithms

Where does the link on your site link to?

This is another major factor for you to take into consideration.
Does it complement your website and explain a related concept in more detail? If so, that’s great
Does it link to a random website (as some automated systems do)? Not so good – you may lose traffic
Does it link to a competitor ? Noooooooooooooo!

I highly recommend that you limit the use of Link Exchanges to those that really do complement your site – one of the best is Value Exchange from SBI! (While you are on that site , check out the free ebook “Make your Links work about halfway down) Sure, it is more work, but you don’t waste all that traffic that you’ve worked so hard to build up.

Other resources

For part 1 of this article – How to use other people’s websites to Increase Traffic and PageRank – click here is here on the New Era Affiliate Marketing Information

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