Thread: The future of link exchanges

Mike,

I agree that it "should" be that way, but I guess ultimately the algorithm of each SE will determine that.

True, I personally have so many sites that I take my time to find sites that "just fit". Everyone has his own strategy. Looking at the SERPs I see many different reasons why each site ranks. I guess that is the beauty of the results, variety

Looking at the SERPs I see many different reasons why each site ranks. I guess that is the beauty of the results, variety

Ha, you call it beauty, I call it maddingly confusing.

It is, lots of trial and error ...

Originally Posted by HMiller

Ha, you call it beauty, I call it maddingly confusing.

What underlies the chaos? Look at it from a different angle. Assuming that there is logic in what Google does (I say google because google is the leader) what is the common thread. The web is dynamic changing every minute, could google be attempting to tap into the change process? If you are doing something you are causing change and perhaps the process of change is as important as what you are doing and that gets results.

I will keep doing what I have been doing. There are people I listen to and take advice from including in this forum
But when I go to digitalpoint for example, 80% of the advice given is wrong and hurtful in the long run IMO.

I go by either related and quality or unrelated and as high quality as possible.

For example: I do not believe msn is as simple as it is made out to be. Everyone at forums praises: msn is so easy to optimize for. But the reality is that when you look at pages far back in msn's SERP's, you have sites perfectly optimized for msn. So why are they not ranking well?

I believe it is all about good neighborhoods. Quality forums linking to quality (mostly) sites which then interlink as well. Digitalpoint has done great for me as well as this forum. It seems to me that msn dwells in those neighborhoods and then picks the sites which are optimized for them.
Otherwise a million sites would be #1. We just became #1 for " surfing " and I believe it was from a growth in incoming links from good neighborhoods.

I have been very lazy about looking for new links for my sites this past month, but I still get a lot of requests to exchange links.

In fact, on one real estate site I received 276 link exchange requests so far this month. Do you know how many I accepted? ZERO!

Why did I pass on them? Because they provide absolutely no benefit for my sites. For example, I some pages that they want to put our links on are dynamically created (with session ID's, CGI scipted, they have hundreds of links on a page, the do not properly organize their links, the pages are excluded from SE's in the robots.txt file, they use the rel=nofollow tag, they use sneaky scripts that prevent spiders from indexing and or following the links. and a host of other junk.

I have posted on this topic before, but I pass along some info again for any newer members. [b]If you want to get good links, you need to give good links[/b/].

Make sure that the spiders can crawl your pages and that your pages pass on Google Page Rank. I am not referring to toolbar PR here, but G's internal PR.

A referral link should never be more than three pages from the index page. This way, even if your home page is a PR3 you should still pass at least a PR1 to your link partners. The PR1 is not all that important in itself, but it does show that Google recognizes this as an "important" page. A PR0 indicates that G does not think that the page is important.

Categorize your links and be as detailed as possible. For example, when you create pages to link to other agents, organize them by state. This helps provide additional relevance for your link partner (i.e. an Ohio agent on an Ohio page).

There's a lot more to a good link page and strategy. You can view my other posts for more info, or visit some of my sites to study strategies.