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SEO 101 Link Trades
By Dwayne Goerges of www.topwebsitetips.com
In one of my previous articles in the SEO 101 Series I talked about Linking to other Sites . In general when linking for the right reasons this is a good idea. Google EXPECTS you to link to high quality related sites and this can even help your site in the serps. Link trades on the other hand can be a very poor idea. So, when is it a good idea to do a link trade? When is it not a good idea to do a link trade? Can it really hurt my site if I make a mistake? Web Promotion Scams
Link trades are a constant source of questions for my clients. Once I get their site to start ranking well in the search engines they start receiving wave after wave of link trade requests. The latest wave I’ve been getting are titling themselves as website promotion ideas. These are pretty easy to spot. The person states how great your site is, how link trade benefit both parties and lists 3 sites that they will link to your site with (all are currently PR 3-4). All you need to do is link to their one site and send them your link information. Sounds great right? WRONG! First in almost all cases these sites have faked PR. Yes, you can fake PR, the easiest way is to point the domain name to a site with the PR of your choice and after a few months point it back to your spammy site and you will start seeing the fake PR on your browser bar. This PR will last a few months, meanwhile you do as many link trades as you can while it looks like the person may actually get something out of it. Second problem, the site is rarely actually related to your site. It’s usually spammy, copied content from another site. The person doesn’t care if they get any search engine results; this is all about getting people to link to their main site. A site they will not be offering to give you a link from but is actually related to your site. Third problem is there will soon be so many outgoing links on the page that even if it did have any value at one time, it won’t now. In short, the vast majority of the emails you receive will be junk. It is very rare to get one that is worth the effort to respond to. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get excited about all the requests though. After all, they did find your site, so they could try spamming you, by doing search engine requests, therefore your current search engine promotion tactics must be working right? When is it a good idea to do a link trade?
Linking to a site means that you endorse the site, that you think that it would be worth recommending the site to your site visitors. ALL link trades should be first based on that. It doesn’t matter what they say they will give you in return (money or links), if upon looking at the site you don’t think that this is the greatest site in the world and you want to tell everyone about it, then don’t agree to the trade (ok, that might be an exaggeration, but you get the point). Can it really hurt my site if I make a mistake?
Yes! Google does not like link trades for the sake of trading (trading PR). Linking to poor quality sites screams link trade or purchased link. Why else would you want to link to the site? If Google (as judged by their algorithms) gets the impression your are selling links or involved in link trading schemes they will first drop your PR and in time start dropping your ranking in the serps.
Bottom line. Only link to sites you like, never link to a site strictly as a link trade or a purchased link. If you get a link back this is a bonus and should not be a requirement.
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Contributor's Note
This is the eighteenth in a series of SEO 101 articles I am writing. I am a 10 year veteran of website building and promotion. These articles outline some of the basic steps I use to promote my clients websites.
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 |  | nick recommended this intel. Jun 17, 2011 |  | | frederick recommended this intel. Jun 17, 2011 |  | | sjgriffith recommended this intel. Jun 17, 2011 |  | | crawfish agreed with this intel. Jun 17, 2011 |  | | biblefreeorg appreciated this intel. Jun 17, 2011 |  | | steroper recommended this intel. Jun 17, 2011 |  | | Laraine recommended this intel. Jun 18, 2011 |  | | Retirement Adventure liked this intel. Jun 19, 2011 | | | sheilamarie appreciated this intel. Jun 19, 2011 |  | | R Foreman liked this intel. Jun 19, 2011 |  | | Heather liked this intel. Jun 20, 2011 |
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AWesome authoritative intel as usual. Thank you for exposing the scam and for educating everyone about the uselessness of link exchanges. I was surprised to hear a client mention Voltrank (a link exchange platform) the other day. It's 2011. Link exchanges are so 2003.
 | | nick Jun 17, 2011 17:35 | |
CONTRIBUTOR'S REPLY
Aw, but there is always someone new to scam!
Thank you for writing about this. It may have been going on in 2003 but some of us have never heard about it as we are newbies. I appreciate any, even "little" bits of info. you can impart. Thanks again!
Thanks for this advice, adac!
The copyright for this content entitled "SEO 101 Link Trades" has been specified by the contributor as:
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If you use this content according to the license specified, you must link to the following URL:
http://adac.qondio.com/
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This intel was contributed by adac
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