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Link Exchange Article
The Benefits of Link Exchange
Posted September 15, 2007
You’ve designed your website and it’s gone online, but you’re still not receiving a lot of hits. What do you have to do in order to get large amounts of visitors to your site?
Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to rely on the major search engines. Google in particular relies on a special algorithm that calculates how often your site is linked to on the World Wide Web. Those sites that are seldom linked to will not show up on the first page of search results, greatly lessening the chances that a casual web surfer will discover them. The sites that are linked to a great deal, on the other hand, are ranked as the most popular sites, and thereby given optimal placement in search engine results.
Get to know how the major search engines work, but also get familiar with other websites in your field. Link exchange is a popular means for similar sites to support one another, while also garnering a higher rank on the major search engines. The easiest way to begin is to simply write an e-mail to websites that you like or are similar to yours in some way, and ask if they’d be interested in exchanging links. There are also discussion boards where webmasters offer link exchange opportunities to one another.
At the same time, it is vital to only exchange links with sites that you trust. That’s because unrelated links that appear on your site will eventually be discovered by Google. Once that happens, they might suspect you of engaging in spamdexing – spamming the index of their search engine in order to get better results. There are some sites that practice widespread link exchange with anyone and everyone in an effort to massively boost their site’s PageRank. The results of this unfortunate practice can be quite disastrous. It can lead to your site being demoted, or even banned.
Keep in mind that it’s not just the quantity of links to your site that matter, but the quality. Websites that are just set up to link to other sites don’t serve any real purpose outside of tricking the search engines. Authentic websites are the ones with the highest ratings – if you can get them to court you, then you are going to get a lot further in the link exchange game!
LINK FARMING: A GOOD IDEA?
Forming a link farm is one method of spamdexing – that is, illicitly spamming the index page of a search engine. It causes a group of web pages to automatically link to one another. Link farms are a relatively new development in the web. The idea came to fruition just after the advent of Google in the late 1990s, when search engine optimizers were seeking ways of increasing their PageRank by cracking the link popularity algorithm. Link farms had existed before, but operated slightly differently in order to cater to the functionality of the earliest search engines. Thus, the link farm in its present day form was adapted.
The search engines didn’t respond kindly to the link farms. They initiated a counterattack by filtering out specific attributes generally attributed to link farm pages. Whole domains were purged from the search engine indexes in an effort to combat their influence on search results.
What’s more, the link farm movement was plagued from within. Some webmasters had begun manipulating the farms towards their own ends, receiving linkage to their sites while failing to post links in return, or else hiding the links on their sites. In response to these internal attacks, link farm administrators had to put quality control in action and begin intensively monitoring member activities in order to protect everyone involved.
Which brings us to the present day. Linkage is now considered to be less of an influence on search engine results than it was in the recent past. Yet link farms still remain a widely used tool for increasing PageRank and other search engine ratings. This, despite the fact that link farming continues to endure a bad reputation. Link farm services refute the claims of the search engines, insisting that they are merely providing a service to benefit and build vital connections in the online community. They even claim that they are providing a valuable alternative to search engines. While their status is widely debated in the virtual world, they do maintain a devoted customer base. The more reputable link exchange systems focus on forging link exchanges between websites that are thematically related. As long as search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN remain popular, it seems that there will always be networks and services devoted to helping sites gain an advantage over the inherent limitations of the search engines – some using more unseemly methods than others.
PAGERANK
Google and other major search engines use a special analytical system called PageRank in order to determine a website’s rating. PageRank is based on an analysis of links to the site – the more often the site is linked to, the more popular it will be. In theory, this system is meant to gauge a site’s quality and quantity – its popularity. If a site becomes incredibly popular and is linked to all over the Internet, then chances are great that it will show up at the top of the search results for a particular phrase. On the contrary, if a site is not linked to anywhere on the Internet, it might not show up in any search engines at all. This is why it is important to have as many links to one’s website as possible. Otherwise, the site could very well end up in the virtual void – unknown save for the webmaster’s immediate friends, family, and associates.
While many webmasters try to start link exchange programs by blindly sending out e-mails asking to exchange links, this is not such a good idea. In fact, if Google gets wind of any sites participating in such programs, they will often banish them altogether. Anyway, it is a well-known fact that one-way links tend to garner more popularity on search engines than reciprocal links.
A more effective way of getting more links to your site is to research sites that cover a similar terrain to your own. Write to these sites and explain the advantages of linking to your site. Remember that increasing your link popularity is like any other facet of business. With a sincere, honest pitch, you’re a lot more likely to get a positive response.
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