In the past, I’ve heard the protocol is to add a site/blog’s link to your own site before approaching them to ask for a link exchange. I guess it is a courteous approach. But it also can be seen as pushy depending on how you look at it, and aggressive if you say you’ll take the link down if yours isn’t up on their site(s) in an x amount of time.
Now I’m hearing to only write an email asking if the webmaster is interested in doing a link exchange. If you hear from them, good. If not, less sticky business or time wasted wondering and checking. This how I’m approaching it.
link management is one of those little things that is a pain in my rear!
it’s better to choose an approach that works best for you than try to pick something that will make things easier for others. no matter what you do, someone’s going to get testy.
from my own experience . . .
at first i sent an email out asking people to trade links. i got as many “i’ve put your link up on my site” as I got “let me know when my link is up on your site and i’ll add yours”. the problem with the second response, for me, was it became a logistical nightmare. i had to:
track that they were “pending”
put their link up
follow-up with a “i’ve added your link” email
wait for their response - often following up with a “did you still want to trade links?” email if they didn’t add it
verify that they actually added it and it was added correctly (no typos)
now I prefer to put the link on my site and send an email asking for a trade. a week after the email goes out I check my analytics to see who has not added me and I send a follow-up email saying something along the lines of “i haven’t heard back from you about the link exchange. I’ll go ahead and remove your link but let me know if you change your mind”
I used to get bothered about putting a link on my site without them linking back, but now I don’t even think twice about sending traffic to someone for a few days.
You probably thought about this already, but track who you do link exchanges with. There are some sites that I won’t work with anymore because there have been one too many incidents of my links falling off their sites or of them telling me they’ll add it “tomorrow” only it never gets added.
Yes, I’ve run into that already. So strange people will say I’ll put it up this weekend and then you never see or hear from them. Doesn’t bode well for integrity or trust. But this has been a small minority so far.
That is a good idea and I’ll think about it. Presently, I’m doing all sorts of tracking. I’ll see what works and am open to others’ ideas on this topic.
Sort of a fundamental question - what’s the point of doing link exchanges? Traffic? SEO? I haven’t seen many that produce much traffic, and 9 times out of 10 the SEO value is questionable.
Personally, I rarely ever do them. The other day someone here had me review his sites. He had INCHES of link exchanges in his sidebar that could have been productive banner ads but instead were a major traffic leak. I didn’t see the point and told him to think about removing all or most of them.
Wow, that is an interesting comment. I wouldn’t care to be bothered with them, but I’m told very strongly by pretty much everyone that I need to do link exchanges ASAP, that it’s a major source of traffic. It was as if the most basic thing to do with a blog for it to get anywhere. This is the first time I heard this. I’m not questioning it, I’m just totally confused now. I wish this was on the main board where more people would read and comment, but it about blogs. I’m lost on this.
[QUOTE=rawTOP;74345]Sort of a fundamental question - what’s the point of doing link exchanges? Traffic? SEO? I haven’t seen many that produce much traffic, and 9 times out of 10 the SEO value is questionable.
Personally, I rarely ever do them. The other day someone here had me review his sites. He had INCHES of link exchanges in his sidebar that could have been productive banner ads but instead were a major traffic leak. I didn’t see the point and told him to think about removing all or most of them.[/QUOTE]
The more INCOMING links a site has, the better it will rank, get crawled, and THAT will bring in traffic, from the SE. Links for TRAFFIC are a waste of time, imo, unless you are doing ‘traffic trades’.
Doing proper link exchanges, is not a waste of time, the problem is recip links are not as popular or great as one way incoming. And those take effort & time to achieve.
UNLESS the links are from sites that Google considers to be in a “bad neighborhood” which is pretty common in porn.
Case and point I built MilkYourBone.com for My Gay Cash. It was starting to get some traction with search engines as we had it in testing. Then affiliates started using the RSS feeds and it got hundreds of inbound links all at once. The links should have been seen as good ones - they were mostly deep links into blog posts and tag and category pages. I even had rel=“canonical” on the links to the posts to deal with syndication issues. By your logic things should have started taking off, but about a week later Google just stopped sending traffic. There would be brief blips where organic traffic would go up for a few days, and then it was like Google would think “oh yeah, don’t like that site…” and it would go down to a trickle again. (see graph below)
Bad neighborhoods are real (especially in porn) and the VD you catch from them you can’t just go to the doctor, get a shot and a couple pills and have it be a bad memory a couple days later… You can completely torpedo your site with indiscriminate link exchanges. All that so you can have traffic leaks on your site. I just don’t get the logic of it…
I get more positive response if I link them first before asking for a link.
On the other hand, I try to limit my links and simply don’t bother if somebody asks me for a link exchange without linking to my site first unless I really like the blog then I would respond to the email.
Now I’m hearing to only write an email asking if the webmaster is interested in doing a link exchange. If you hear from them, good. If not, less sticky business or time wasted wondering and checking. This how I’m approaching it.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=rawTOP;74345]Sort of a fundamental question - what’s the point of doing link exchanges? Traffic? SEO? I haven’t seen many that produce much traffic, and 9 times out of 10 the SEO value is questionable.
Personally, I rarely ever do them. The other day someone here had me review his sites. He had INCHES of link exchanges in his sidebar that could have been productive banner ads but instead were a major traffic leak. I didn’t see the point and told him to think about removing all or most of them.[/QUOTE]
More and more I agree with Rawtop on this. I’m no longer sure traditional link exchanges makes any difference in terms of SEO. Yes in theory the more incoming links the better you will score in Search engines. The problem is that majority of sites you would get links from might be worthless, potentially cause you more harm than good. And I don’t know how to figure out which are good or bad.
It also seems that one-way links (incoming only, no return link) are far more valuable than a normal link. If you look at all the top sites in Google they don’t have a single out going link off their sites yet 100,000 incoming.
A suggestion would be to link in a natural way. Only do link exchanges with sites you really like, blogs you would regularly read and visit. That way at least the link stay true to what you see as a quality site.
Bjorn, how many of those links (link exchanges) should a blog have? Five, ten, twenty, fifty?
What about link exchanges with Google’s blogger blogs? Are these better because they are supposedly not commercial? They also might get more traffic to their sites?
I don’t know how a blog would get an incoming link only.
[QUOTE=tim;74385]Bjorn, how many of those links (link exchanges) should a blog have? Five, ten, twenty, fifty?
What about link exchanges with Google’s blogger blogs? Are these better because they are supposedly not commercial? They also might get more traffic to their sites?
I don’t know how a blog would get an incoming link only.[/QUOTE]
here is a good strategy tim:
on your main blog - or money blog - you are not going to do any link exchanges or trade links.
you are going to create a network of blogs for link exchanges. make them of decent quality so people are going to trade with them. say 10-20 or whatever. even just a couple to start.
when you do a link exchange you will offer a link on one of the network of blogs you created for link exchanges in exchange for a link to your money blog. that was google sees it as a one way link. this is called an a-b-c trade.
of course this is just for link trades for seo/google not traffic trades.
might want to brush up on the importance of title tags, anchor text, backlinks - just google “title tages seo” for example.
:rolleyes: I’m only commenting 'cause I like Tim. He’s a newbie and needs to be protected from some of the stuff that’s said here…
Google what you just said and you’ll see there’s stuff back in 2006/2007 saying Google can detect A-B-C link trades - apparently Matt Cutts even commented on it.
What you just told Tim to do is to create a bad neighborhood and then point that bad neighborhood at your money blogs.
If you decide to link with Blogger accounts, be prepared for creating more work for yourself. Blogger deletes those blogs without warning, so if you don’t actively maintain your link list your site will have a lot of dead links and that can also cause you problems with SEO rankings.
I know some people refuse to trade links with blogger blogs at all. If not for the reason above, then I’m not sure what other problems they’ve encountered.
[QUOTE=rawTOP;74393]:rolleyes: I’m only commenting 'cause I like Tim. He’s a newbie and needs to be protected from some of the stuff that’s said here…
Google what you just said and you’ll see there’s stuff back in 2006/2007 saying Google can detect A-B-C link trades - apparently Matt Cutts even commented on it.
What you just told Tim to do is to create a bad neighborhood and then point that bad neighborhood at your money blogs.[/QUOTE]
read again what i said. i don’t think you understood.
also spread out out the network of blogs over multiple hosts and free hosts.
this tactic - and buying links - is how people - myself included - rank for more competitive adult terms. just giving some advice that works.
in regards to what google says, take what they say with grain of salt. trust what actually makes your rank. think out of the box and experiment and study the sites actually ranking for the big money terms.
[QUOTE=rawTOP;74393]:rolleyes: I’m only commenting 'cause I like Tim. He’s a newbie and needs to be protected from some of the stuff that’s said here…
Google what you just said and you’ll see there’s stuff back in 2006/2007 saying Google can detect A-B-C link trades - apparently Matt Cutts even commented on it.
What you just told Tim to do is to create a bad neighborhood and then point that bad neighborhood at your money blogs.[/QUOTE]
the money site isn’t going to link to anything for link trades.
that’s the point of creating a network of sites for link trades. THEY are the sites that link out. your money site is staying clean and keeping link juice. understand?
google “a-b-c link trades” “a-b-c-d link trades” for more info.
You missed the point, you’ve put the money site in a bad neighborhood. Unless the site is well established having a bunch of spammy links pointing to a site can kill it in the eyes of Google.
you can only get penalized if you a link to a bad neighborhood, not if they link to you, otherwise i could sink your serps by linking you from shit sites.
your a-b-c or a-b-c-d link trades from your network of blogs are only going to be quality link trades. no link farms or bad neighborhoods.
you are not either reading what i am saying or not understanding, so this is my last post on this. anyone who wants to use this information go ahead, the great thing about seo if that you can lay out a detailed plan on how to rank and only 0.0001% will get it, put in the work, and be able to put aside their preconceptions and ego to grok the data. peace.
Wrong. You can kill a new site by flooding it with bad links. Welcome to black hat SEO. The new site doesn’t have to do anything wrong. At that stage in it’s development it’s guilt by association. That’s EXACTLY what happened (inadvertently) to Milk Your Bone in the example above.
Only well established sites can withstand a lot of links from a bad neighborhood.
