Author: Dean Chu

Date: August 20, 2007

 

Recently, I joined a number of link exchange programs because I wanted to see for myself if these link exchange schemes would improve my website traffic, link popularity and pagerank. It didn't take long before I realized that it was a big deception and instead of improving my PageRank and SERP (Search Engine Result Page) I saw my pages sank in Google search index. Was I being penalized or have I diluted my PageRank because of all the outbound links and no good incoming links? While there were some legitimate websites owners who joined the link exchange programs that I joined, the majority of them were spammers and scammers. Especially the ones that is "Powered" by the Link Exchange websites themselves. Here are some tips to avoid bad link exchange partners:

Avoid most free link exchange websites - As most of its members tend to be link farmers and linking to them does little for your website in the eyes of Google. When Google sees a page with hundreds of links, it usually places a very low importance or none at all on the individual links on those pages. If you want to get noticed by a search engine, your best bet is to have good contents. Most link requests that I received, when I was on these websites, were from link farmers. You can tell by looking at the link pages and see nothing but row upon rows of links. Linking to these websites could get you penalized by search engines. If you insist on exchanging links do it the old fashion way and seek it out and request for it and avoid taking shortcuts. It only take a few bad links from your site to a penalized website to undo months and even years of your link popularity, page ranking and search engine optimization efforts.

When requesting or considering link exchanges - Make sure that the other website topic is relevant to your own. If you are building an online business, you need to be careful with whom you associate, so don't accept all link exchange requests because irrelevant links will only dilute your pagerank status. It is simply not true that a link is a link and therefore any link better than none. For the same reason link farm may not be good for your website, because a link farm by nature has no theme other than a whole bunch of links on it, often unrelated. Exchanging links with one of those website and your site will suffer from rank dilution.

Verify your exchanged link is actually on their page - Don't just follow the link that they provided you of where they placed your link. Instead go to their home or index page then try to find a link on that page that would take you to the link exchange page. If you cannot find a link from the homepage, don't accept the link exchange. If you have to follow 3 or more links, ie going deep into their website to get to the link page, don't accept the link exchange because it will take months for the search engine to index that page. Assuming you found the link page and it is not too deep in their website make sure that the link actually links back to your website. Also check to ensure that there is no robot text in the linkage html code or in the header section to tell the search engines to ignore or disallow, for example rel= "nofollow" or "disallow". This robot texts instruct the search engines to ignore the link and therefore it won't help you with link popularity and PageRank.

Ensure that the Link Exchange request is legitimate - Be cautious of link scams not adding your link at all, remove it after a short period hoping that you will not check, or they may publish your links on an orphaned page that is not accessible to anyone including search engines.

Avoid websites that place exchange links on robot-unfriendly pages - That store links in an external file like javascript or on flash embedded links and so forth. While search engines are becoming more sophisticated some will not access those files while it is scouring the internet. Accept nothing less than an HTML coded link that is accessible to both human and robots.

In short having many websites linking to you could be beneficial to your overall pagerank and link popularity, but linking back to just a few bad apples could undo all of your hard work and time spent on search engine optimization to increase your link popularity and pagerank statuses. Take the time and learn how to properly optimize your website for search engines in nine easy steps.

Author Bio: Dean Chu a sales and marketing professional offering website design and web marketing consultation. This article is copyrighted and you may use this article free of charge provided you keep the about the author with link intact.